Visual Simulation of Solar Photosphere Based on Magnetohydrodynamics and Quantum Theory

Abstract

〈Summary〉 We propose an efficient method based on physical laws to model phenomena near the surface of the sun, which is known as the solar photosphere. In the field of astronomy, some physical models have been developed to simulate the sun’s turbulence. Most of the previous models are difficult to be applied in the making of CG images since they require a considerable amount of time even when using a supercomputer. The subject of our research is the visual simulation of the phenomena observed above the photosphere, namely solar prominences, because these are characteristic phenomena of the sun that can greatly influence the visual impact in movies and games.The sun is mainly composed of ionized plasma, and its behavior can be treated as a fluid. However, unlike gas, the plasma fluid is influenced by the magnetic field. Thus, magnetic field calculations are needed to calculate the plasma behavior. We use the magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) equations to simulate the behavior of plasma. We propose a new method which can simulate a prominence in a practical computation time. The computation cost is reduced by simplifying the phenomena inside the sun: we only consider the phenomena after the solar prominence erupts because the phenomena before the eruption dose not manifest itself in a visual way. To render the simulation results, we emulate an observation method that extracts the specific spectrum emission from the solar plasma.