Parametric simulation studies on the wave propagation of solar radio emission: the source size, duration, and position

TL;DR

This study uses parametric ray-tracing simulations to analyze how anisotropic electron density fluctuations affect the apparent size, duration, and position of solar radio burst sources at 35 MHz, revealing the impact of scattering and refraction.

Contribution

First simulation of how anisotropic fluctuations influence solar radio source properties, enabling estimation of scattering parameters from observed source size and duration.

Findings

Isotropic fluctuations cause longer decay times than anisotropic ones.

Estimated scattering coefficient and anisotropy parameter from observations.

Wave scattering and refraction can produce co-spatial fundamental and harmonic sources.

Abstract

The observed features of the radio sources indicate complex propagation effects embedded in the waves of solar radio bursts. In this work, we perform ray-tracing simulations on radio wave transport in the corona and interplanetary region with anisotropic electron density fluctuations. For the first time, the variation of the apparent source size, burst duration, and source position of both fundamental emission and harmonic emission at frequency 35 MHz are simulated as the function of the anisotropic parameter $\alpha$ and the angular scattering rate coefficient $\eta =\epsilon^2/h_0$, where $\epsilon^2={\langle \delta n^2\rangle}/{n^2}$ is the density fluctuation level and $h_0$ is its correlation length near the wave exciting site. It is found that isotropic fluctuations produce a much larger decay time than a highly anisotropic fluctuation for fundamental emission. By comparing the observed duration and source size with the simulation results in the parameter space, we can estimate the scattering coefficient and the anisotropy parameter $\eta = 8.9\times 10^{-5}\, \mathrm{km^{-1}}$ and $\alpha = 0.719$ with point pulse source assumption. Position offsets due to wave scattering and refraction can produce the co-spatial of fundamental and harmonic waves in observations of some type III radio bursts. The visual speed due to the wave propagation effect can reach 1.5\,$c$ for $\eta = 2.4\times 10^{-4}\, \mathrm{km^{-1}}$ and $\alpha=0.2$ for fundamental emission in the sky plane, accompanying with large expansion rate of the source size. The visual speed direction is mostly identical to the offset direction, thus, for the observation aiming at obtaining the source position, the source centroid at the starting point is closer to the wave excitation point.