Modeling the cyclic modulation of photospheric lines

¹ INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, via Frascati 33, 00040 Monte Porzio Catone, Italy e-mail: penza@roma2.infn.it
² Universitá di Roma “Tor Vergata”, via della Ricerca Scientifica 1, 00133 Roma, Italy
³ Dipartimento di Fisica, Universitá degli Studi di L'Aquila, via Vetoio, 67010 Coppito, L'Aquila, Italy
⁴ National Solar Observatory, PO Box 26732, Tucson, AZ 85726, USA

Received: 11 May 2005
Accepted: 9 March 2006

Abstract

We have studied the behavior of three photospheric lines (Fe I 537.9, C I 538.0 and Ti II 538.1 nm), which have been monitored on the Sun for more than twenty years, either as full-disk or as center-disk measurements (Gray & Livingston 1997; Livingston & Wallace 2003). The aim is to detect a possible photospheric variation with the cycle. We try to reconstruct the cyclic variations of full-disk line depths as due to active region (AR) modulation through a spectral synthesis with FAL semi-empirical models (Fontenla et al. 1999) weighted by AR coverage factors. The sensitivity of these lines to thermodynamic variations and to AR presence is analyzed. We show that the AR modulation alone cannot explain all the observational results, either in amplitude or in phase. The “residual”, i.e. the difference between observed behavior of these three lines at full-disk and that predicted by models for the AR modulation, results in a signal that is correlated with the measured center-disk line variations, and should be free from magnetic effects. Both the full-disk and the center-disk data show several periodicities; furthermore there are two periodicities shared by the three lines, one close to the 11 yr magnetic cycle and the other of 2.8 yr.