Unveiling the Sun, next generation studies of the Sun's magnetic activity

The Sun's character is determined by its dynamic and evolving magnetic field, which harbours energy that is used to power some of the most violent and energetic events in the Solar System - coronal mass ejections. These ejections are of intense interest as they can drive major space weather impact at Earth, and space weather forecasters around the world seek to predict when an eruption will reach the Earth and what the degree of impact will be.

For example, the changes these ejections produce in the near-Earth space environment can ultimately lead to disruptions to electricity distribution, communications, and navigation systems. Knowing why and when these ejections will occur are questions that are centrally important to not only understand how the Sun operates but also for developing an ability to make accurate space weather forecasts.

However, for many decades the Sun appears to produce eruptions that are detected at Earth but which are not seen leaving the Sun's atmosphere. These are "stealthy" events and research at MSSL has shown that they may originate from high up in the Sun's atmosphere, at the limit of where our telescopes previously were able to collect data. That was the case until the launch of ESA's Solar Orbiter spacecraft, which provides a new set of eyes on the Sun through the EUI telescope that images the Sun's atmosphere using extreme ultraviolet radiation and which enables a view much larger than previously possible.

In this project, wide field-of-view EUV images will be used to monitor how large-scale plasma and magnetic structures evolve over time and how changes at small spatial scales are able to contribute to the large-scale evolution of the magnetic field to the point of eruption. The research will employ relevant image processing techniques to identify evolutionary pathways that lead to the ejection of high-altitude coronal mass ejections.

Data will be used from the Solar Orbiter mission (that was launched in 2020), in which MSSL plays a leading role, but there are opportunities to use other space-based instrumentation, such as from NASA's Parker Solar Probe, and data from ground-based radio telescopes to provide a multi-wavelength analysis.