The Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias hosted this week the global meeting of the members of the European project The Whole Sun, a project approved and funded by the European Research Council (ERC) as part of its Synergy Grant calls. The duration of the project is seven years (from 2019 to 2026) and its full title is: “The whole Sun: untangling the complex physical mechanisms behind our eruptive star and its twins”.
The main objective of the ERC’s Synergy Grant calls is to promote the joint work of groups of researchers in different European institutions so that all the necessary tools, resources and skills are pooled to jointly tackle challenging research problems that could not be solved by a single group working in isolation. The Whole Sun project is constituted by research teams from five European institutions, namely the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, in Spain; the CEA (Commissariat a l'energie atomique et aux energies alternatives) in France; the Max-Planck society (Max-Planck Gesellschaft) in Germany; the University of Oslo in Norway; and the University of Ioanina, in Greece.
All these groups are specialized in Solar Physics, either in the study of the interior of the Sun or of its atmosphere. The objective of the project is to facilitate the joint work of specialists in the interior with researchers whose field of expertise is the solar atmosphere, so that, through their mutual collaboration, the large gap in physical techniques, approaches and tools needed to study those very different regions can be bridged. This joint goal-setting, and the sharing and development of research tools is essential if one is to advance in the knowledge of the physics of our star.
The meeting has been organized by the IAC team in the project, under the leadership of Prof Fernando Moreno-Insertis, together with Drs Ernest Alsina, Daniel Nóbrega Siverio, Samrat Sen and Etienne Pariat.
The Sun is often the subject of news in the daily and specialized press because of its spectacular eruptions of magnetized plasma, some of which traverse the space between the Sun and Earth and impinge on Earth´s magnetosphere, causing solar storms and, consequently, the spectacular phenomenon of polar lights. On the other hand, the Sun is also famous because of the appearance in its surface of sunspots, concentrations of high-intensity magnetic field generated in the solar interior through a physical process many of whose components are still poorly known. We do not get light directly from the solar interior: its study requires the use of seismological techniques combined with theoretical models. On the other hand, the study of the solar atmosphere requires the combination of two important fields in physics, namely the physics of plasmas and the physics of the radiation-matter interaction.
“The promotion of research links between groups working on those fields is essential for progress in the knowledge of the physics of our star. This is the objective of this European project. In this meeting we have organized both presentations of the most recent results of the various groups within the project as well as discussion groups for specific topics within it” says the project leader at the IAC, Fernando Moreno-Insertis.
Of particular interest within the meeting has been the presentation of large, state-of-the-art numerical codes necessary to study the complex physics of the solar interior and atmosphere which are being developed in the framework of the project. The meeting has provided a very useful setting for the exchange of ideas, preparation of new research lines and, in general, to enhance the synergies between the different groups, perspectives and techniques necessary to study the different regions of our star.
