Our understanding of sunspots is far from complete despite intensive research over hundreds of years. Radiation at submillimeter and millimeter wavelengths is formed in local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) in the low to mid chromosphere, and its intensity depends linearly on the ambient temperature of the medium. Observations at these wavelengths thus provide important diagnostics of sunspot chromospheres (Loukitcheva et al. 2014). The largest radio telescope in the world, the Atacama […]

The small-scale temperature structure of prominences remains an outstanding question in solar physics. Theoretical models provide scenarios for how cool prominence plasma can be formed and maintained within the extreme conditions of the corona. However, knowledge of the detailed temperature structure of the prominence plasma and its evolution at small spatial and temporal scales is still lacking. The Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) provides a novel method for high spatial […]

Determining the detailed temperature structure of the solar atmosphere from observations is a basic means of constructing and testing atmospheric models. One avenue to address this problem is based on measuring the center-to-limb variation of the intensity in various spectral regions. Observations in the radio domain are particularly suited for such a task since they don’t suffer from a set of complications (e.g., departures from the ionization and local thermodynamic […]