Speaker: Mats Carlsson
Title: Understanding the workings of the energetic Sun
Abtract: The Sun is a relatively quiet star with a variation in the total energy output of only 0.1% over the 11-year solar cycle. In short wavelengths and in particle emission, the situation is different - solar active regions with large sunspots may cause major eruptions, called flares, often accompanied by ejections of high-energy particles, magnetic field and plasma. These solar storms cause northern light displays and may damage satellites, electronics and power distribution systems on Earth.
The Rosseland Centre for Solar Physics (RoCS) has a focus on understanding the physics at the origin of space weather. We do this through a combination of observations from the ground and space and large scale computer simulations. I will give an overview of some of these research challenges and the progress we have seen over recent years. Our simulations today can be run on systems with 100,000 processors but we are developing new methods that can be run on the next generation of supercomputers with millions of cores. Such computational capacity is necessary for the modelling of the whole Sun as one coupled system.