Alistair Göpffarth, Andreas Goris, Rudolf Scheuren
About 3 years ago we were given a homemade radio telescope by our predecessors from the Physics Club of St. Michael-Gymnasium. Initially, we improved its tracking and data recording capabilities. This allowed us to record long, continuous data sets and to record many solar storms including one that was mentioned in Rudolf Kippenhahn's book "Der Stern, vom dem wir leben" (translates to "The star that supports our life").
The Max-Planck-Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn asked us to investigate the following hypothesis of Russian scientists: "The optical solar oscillations can also be observed in the radio wave part of the spectrum." We were supposed to check this hypothesis based on simultaneous measurements with another radio telescope located in Potsdam. However, the intended cross correlation of both measurements could not take place as the team in Potsdam stopped their measurements too early due to the German reunification. Thus, we could only process our own measurements using autocorrelations and fast Fourier transforms. We concluded that solar radio oscillations do not exist as the oscillations of the photosphere do not cause oscillations of the solar corona.
Furthermore, we analysed all recorded solar storms and introduced our own classification scheme with 3 storm categories. We also suggest a new model for their formation which takes optical observations into account. I.e. we amended the conventional classifications for solar storms that only consider processes in the solar corona to include the equally important processes in the photosphere of the sun. This also enables us to some extent to predict solar storms.
