Subsidy for Solar Physics aims to understand the Sun in its entirety



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The European Research Council (ERC) will fund an ambitious solar physics project at MPS over the next six years. The research project called WHOLESUN aims to understand the origin of solar magnetic activity by studying the Sun in its entirety.

It is funded by a prestigious Synergy grant from the European Research Council (ERC), awarded to a team of four leading European researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany. 39, University of St. Andrews, United Kingdom. , the CEA research center in France and the University of Oslo in Norway.

The researchers will pool their expertise in solar physics over the next six years to determine how the magnetic field is generated inside the sun to create sunspots on the sun's surface and eruptions in the sun. solar atmosphere. To this end, the team will attempt to model the Sun as a whole using supercomputers and incorporating observational knowledge from space missions.

The ERC has awarded twenty-seven ERC Synergy grants to research teams from all over Europe. The highly coveted grants, worth a total of € 250 million, will enable teams of two to four senior researchers to bring together complementary skills, knowledge and resources to collectively tackle research problems at the frontiers of knowledge. .

The grants are part of the Horizon 2020 European Union Research and Innovation Program. The WHOLESUN project will receive 11.2 million euros over a six-year period.

Violent solar flares throw charged particles and radiation into space. "The origin of all the eruptive phenomena that we observe in the Sun's atmosphere however lies much deeper in our star," says Professor Lawrence Gizon, one of WHOLESUN's lead researchers and director General of the MPS. Inside the Sun, plasma movements create the magnetic fields of the Sun, which cause solar flares.

Solar physics is too often divided between studies of the interior and the atmosphere. "Following the formation and evolution of solar magnetic fields requires an integrated vision," insists Robert Cameron of MPS. This is where the WHOLESUN research project comes in.

The team will develop numerical and observational tools to track the life cycle of solar magnetic fields from their formation and amplification to the interior, their rise to the solar surface and their eruptive dynamics in the solar atmosphere. The MPS will bring its expertise in the field of solar sounding in helioseismology and modeling of surface layers using numerical simulations.

"The WHOLESUN project is an exciting multidisciplinary approach to solar physics, which will lead to new collaborations in Europe," predicts Professor Eric Priest of the University of St. Andrews.

The WHOLESUN project is made possible by advances in supercomputing. "The project will develop numerical models of the entire Sun that will run on exascale supercomputers performing a billion arithmetic operations per second," says lead investigator Allan Sacha Brown of CEA Saclay France.

Numerical models will be used in combination with observations to solve many unresolved mysteries of solar physics. For example, we do not know how sunspots are formed or what triggers the most energetic solar flares.

The results will not only be used to model the space environment around the Earth, but will also be important for understanding the magnetism of distant stars and their effects on exoplanets.

"The science that will flow from this ERC Synergy project will help us prepare for the launch of ESA PLATO's exoplanetary mission in 2026," said Gizon.

Related Links

Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research

Solar Science News at SpaceDaily



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