Cole Tamburri

Current projects

High-resolution analysis of coronal flare loops

On 8 August 2024, the sun released a massive GOES-class X1.2 solar flare. During our flare campaign, we captured the decay phase of this flare under excellent seeing conditions, revealing Hα images of highly structured flare ribbons, a top-down view of coronal rain, and the smallest post-reconnection flare loops ever observed - by any telescope.

Read the study here…

… and a press release associated with this work here.

Detailed modeling of chromospheric flare spectra

The most exciting component of my graduate students has been the collection of high-resolution observations of flare spectra with the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope. Over the course of two flare campaigns for which I was the PI (2022 and 2024), we have observed four flares - including the only impulsive phase observations of a flare captured by DKIST (11 August 2024.)

Recently, I have been investigating the remarkable spectral variability in the chromospheric Ca II H, Hβ, and Hϵ spectral lines during this flare over spatial scales of only ~100-200 km, requiring very different heating mechanisms to explain. In my most recent work, I have investigated the implications of proton beam heating and combined electron-beam heating in producing salient properties of the impulsive phase flare spectra.

The Impulsiveness of Solar Flares

For my Masters’ project, I developed a new classification mechanism for flares that captures the “impulsiveness” (or suddenness) of their emission. In stellar flare spectra, this feature has been found to be related to the Balmer jump ratio, and could be indicative of important fundamental flare processes. We found that the Impulsiveness Index may be related to the rates of particle precipitation in flares, a key finding that could inform our understanding of both solar and stellar flares using only the information included in Sun-as-a-star light curves.

Read the paper here.