Low radio frequency observations are a unique probe of the solar corona. They carry information on a host of coronal phenomena ranging from the nano-flares hypothesized to explain coronal heating at one of the energy spectra to the coronal mass ejections associated with the most violent events in the solar system on the other. While this has been known for a long time, it has been a challenge to extract information of interest from radio data, primarily due to technical reasons associated with radio interferometric imaging and issues of precise polarimetric calibration of these data. The confluence of data from new-generation instruments like the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) and our homegrown calibration and imaging pipelines has led to a big jump in the imaging fidelity and dynamic range of solar radio images. The snapshot spectro-polarimetric imaging delivered by this combination is giving us access to previously unexplored phase space, which is, in turn, yielding some very interesting and sometimes even surprising results. I will briefly summarise the reasons why instruments like the MWA can deliver unprecedented radio imaging quality, and then present some highlights from the work of our group chosen to showcase how these studies have led to building new insights about coronal processes - sometimes helping us understand previous unappreciated aspects of phenomena which have been known for 70 years, and at others discovering previously unknown phenomena.
Prof. Divya Oberoi is a professor at NCRA, Pune. He obtained his Ph.D. from IISc & NCRA-TIFR in 2000. He was a postdoctoral researcher at LPC2E Orleans, France between 2000 and 2002, and then a postdoc at the MIT Haystack Observatory, USA, where he further worked as a research scientist between 2005 and 2012. He is an expert on Solar and Heliospheric Physics. This seminar is a part of the activities commemorating "75 years of India's Independence: Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav" at ARIES.