Living with a Star - the Many Faces of our Sun

Solar activity controls the heliopshere and has inescapable consequences for life on Earth in the 21st century. As our closest star the Sun is also the astronomical object that we can observe in the greatest detail, providing a ‘rosetta stone’ for understanding physical processes throughout the solar system and beyond. In this talk we will explore the new insights into the origins of solar activity that observations from current space and ground-based facilities have brought us in recent years, and how new developments will help to answer the outstanding questions in the future.

Biography

Sarah Matthews is a Professor and Head of Solar Physics at UCL’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory. Her research interests focus on energy storage and release in magnetised plasmas, and in particular solar eruptive events and the origins space weather. Her work is mainly observational, bringing together multi-wavelength space and ground-based observations, but she also works in collaboration with magnetic field modellers in particular to interpret the observations in the context of current models. She also has an interest in instrumentation and is currently the PI for the EUV Imaging Spectromter (EIS) on the Japanese-UK-US Hinode satellite and has been leading the development of an Extreme Ultraviolet Camera for the succcessor to Hinode, Solar-C.