Siraj Hasan | New Insights & Challenges In Probing The Sun | Winter School on Astronomy 2020
Channel: Astronomy Winter School
Date: 2020-06-25

The Sun is a cosmic powerhouse that has a profound impact on our planet and its future. It is a giant laboratory that enables us to probe and test processes in high temperature plasmas that cannot be ordinarily simulated in the terrestrial environment. Being the nearest star, it serves as a proxy for understanding conditions in other stars. Its stormy atmosphere displays rich phenomena ranging from sunspots to powerful explosions that strongly influence the Earth and the space environment. The Sun’s activity is fundamentally due to solar magnetism and its emission changes with the
sunspot cycle as well as on longer time scales of centuries to millions of years. Unravelling the mysteries of these complex processes involving sophisticated mathematical modelling as well as observations continues to pose a major challenge to scientists. This talk highlights some of the major recent developments in this area, including helioseismology through which the solar interior can be probed, the nature of magnetism and its role in modulating activity and eruptions such as flares in the solar atmosphere.
India is expected to take a major initiative in the study of the Sun through the setting up of a world-class facility. It will be one of the world’s most powerful solar telescopes to address a multitude of crucial, well-posed problems in astrophysics and critical issues in the Sun's important influences on the Earth ("space weather"), and understanding the release of solar energy into the solar system on a gigantic scale.