Related papers: Sunrise Mission Highlights
Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs) have to travel through the heliosphere before they interact with the Earth's atmosphere. During this, they are deflected by the Sun's magnetic field, causing variations in this field to imprint on the flux,…
The observations of magnetic field variations as a signature of flaring activity is one of the main goal in solar physics. Some efforts in the past give apparently no unambiguous observations of changes. We observed that the scaling laws of…
The Sun's magnetic field varies in multiple time scales. Observations show that the minimum between cycles 24 and 25 was the second consecutive minimum which was deeper and wider than several earlier minima. Since the active regions…
Owing to the ever-present solar wind, our vast solar system is full of plasmas. The turbulent solar wind, together with sporadic solar eruptions, introduces various space plasma processes and phenomena in the solar atmosphere all the way to…
The Sun is an active star that can have a direct impact on the Earth, its magnetosphere, and the technological infrastructure on which modern society depends. Among the phenomena that drive "space weather" are fast solar wind streams and…
In 1844 Schwabe discovered that the number of sunspots increased and decreased over a period of about 11 years, that variation became known as the sunspot cycle. Almost eighty years later, Hale described the nature of the Sun's magnetic…
As the powerhouse of our solar system, the Sun's electromagnetic planetary influences appear contradictory. On the one hand, the Sun for aeons emitted radiation which was "just right" for life to evolve in our terrestrial Goldilocks zone,…
The theory of stellar structure can be used to identify the most plausible mechanisms for the irradiance variations associated with the solar cycle. Changes in surface emissivity, i.e. the reduced cooling in spots and enhanced emission by…
The Sun is expected to increase its radiant output by about 10% per billion years. The rate at which the radius of the Earth's orbit would need to increase in order to keep the present value of the Sun's radiant flux at the Earth constant…
The dynamics of the solar wind depends intrinsically on the structure of the global solar magnetic field, which undergoes fundamental changes over the 11-yr solar cycle. For instance, the wind terminal velocity is thought to be…
The magnetic activity of the Sun, as manifested in the sunspot cycle, originates deep within its convection zone through a dynamo mechanism which involves non-trivial interactions between the plasma and magnetic field in the solar interior.…
Strong solar magnetic fields are the energy source of intense flares and energetic coronal mass ejections of space weather importance. The key issue is the difficulty in predicting the occurrence time and location of strong solar eruptions,…
Solar Orbiter, the first mission of ESA's Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 programme and a mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA, will explore the Sun and heliosphere from close up and out of the ecliptic plane. It was launched…
How has the solar wind evolved to reach what it is today? In this review, I discuss the long-term evolution of the solar wind, including the evolution of observed properties that are intimately linked to the solar wind: rotation, magnetism…
Future remote sensing of exoplanets will be enhanced by a thorough investigation of our solar system Ice Giants (Neptune-size planets). What can the configuration of the magnetic field tell us (remotely) about the interior, and what…
Here we review the recent progress made in the detection, examination, characterisation and interpretation of oscillations manifesting in small-scale magnetic elements in the solar photosphere. This region of the Sun's atmosphere is…
The level of solar magnetic activity, as exemplified by the number of sunspots and by energetic events in the corona, varies on a wide range of time scales. Most prominent is the 11-year solar cycle, which is significantly modulated on…
Surface solar irradiance varies on scales as small as seconds or meters due to scattering and absorption by the atmosphere. Clouds are the main driver of this variability, but moisture structures in the atmospheric boundary layer and…
In recent years supergranulation has emerged as one of the biggest challenges for the detection of Earth-twins in radial velocity planet searches. We used eight years of Sun-as-a-star radial velocity observations from HARPS-N to measure the…
The presence of magnetic field is crucial in the transport of energy through the solar atmosphere. Recent ground-based and space-borne observations of the quiet Sun have revealed that magnetic field accumulates at photospheric heights, via…