About

Atefeh Barekat is a master student at the Astronomy Department at Stockholm University. She started her master thesis in November on a "Radiative mean-field model of convection in and around a sunspot" under the supervision of Axel Brandenburg. In particular, using the Pencil Code, she is modeling the local suppression of the convective heat flux by the magnetic field, which is expected to lead to local cooling, local contraction, and thereby further field amplification. She is including fully nonlocal radiation transport along rays permeating the domain at a number of different angles. The idea is that this process can amplify the magnetic field beyond the level that is possible through the negative magnetic pressure instability mentioned in Newsletter 2011/3. This might therefore explain the formation of sunspots within so-called active regions.