Related papers: How the sun shines
Because of the lack of reliable sunspot observation, the quality of sunspot number series is poor in the late 18th century, leading to the abnormally long solar cycle (1784--1799) before the Dalton minimum. Using the newly recovered solar…
We venture that the long evolution of science may be viewed as unfolding over three blurred epochs. The first epoch spans the slow, haphazard, error-ridden realization of scientific truths along with foundational scientific methods. The…
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…
The search of a rational explanation of eclipses pervades the beginnings of philosophical and scientific thought. Within this intellectual frame, the knowledge of the "saros cycle" (a cycle of 18 years, 10 or 11 days and 1/3 of a day that…
Determining the heating mechanism (or mechanisms) that causes the outer atmosphere of the Sun, and many other stars, to reach temperatures orders of magnitude higher than their surface temperatures has long been a key problem. For decades…
Soon after Einstein's calculation of the effect of the Sun's gravitational field on the propagation of light in 1911, astronomers around the world tried to measure and verify the value. If the first attempts in Brazil in 1912 or Imperial…
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.…
Neutrino produced in a chain of nuclear reactions in the Sun starting from the fusion of two protons, for the first time has been detected in a real-time detector in spectrometric mode. The unique properties of the Borexino detector…
The luminosity constraint is a very precise relationship linking the power released by the Sun as photons and the solar neutrino fluxes. Such a relation, which is a direct consequence of the physical processes controlling the production and…
In the past four decades a new type of astronomy has emerged, where instead of looking up into the sky "telescopes" are buried miles underground or deep under water or ice and search not for photons (that is, light), but rather for…
The neutrino produced in the pion decay reveals a new diffraction phenomenon due to many-body interactions in an intermediate time region when wave functions of the parent and daughters overlap. Because of diffraction, the probability to…
The Olbers conjecture, that under reasonable assumptions, light from the stars should sum at the Earth to make the sky bright at night, has been a subject of study since the early 19th century. It has been incorporated into some of modern…
A paper published by Scottish geophysicist J.A. Broun in 1858 contained several pioneering and remarkable ideas in solar-terrestrial physics. He could anticipate more or less correctly the nature and origin of solar wind, solar magnetic…
I give a brief review of a few recent developments and future directions in the search for dark matter using high-energy neutrinos from the Sun. This includes the ability to recast neutrino telescope limits on nuclear scattering of dark…
Both the first evidence and the first discoveries of neutrino flavor transformation have come from experiments which use neutrino beams provided by Nature. These discoveries were remarkable not only because they were unexpected--they were…
Early observations of sunspot were realised by the naked eye. Possible utilization of these records for studying the long-term change in the Sun is discussed here. Other historical sunspot observations with camera obscuras are also…
Recent observations of solar twin stars with planetary systems like the Sun, have uncovered that these present a peculiar surface chemical composition. This is believed to be related to the formation of earth-like planets. This suggests…
The first three quarters of this paper consists of a pedagogical review of neutrino oscillations, including vacuum oscillations, constant density matter oscillations and variable density matter oscillations. We then address the question of…
In these Canberra summer school lectures we treat a number of topical issues in neutrino astrophysics: the solar neutrino problem, including the physics of the standard solar model, helioseismology, and the possibility that the solution…
We study the lensing of neutrinos by astrophysical objects. At the difference of photons, neutrinos can cross a stellar core; as a result the lens quality improves. While Saturnians alone would benefit from this effect in the Sun, similar…