About the project
The Sun is our star and governs the solar system. There is a long scientific tradition of observing and studying the Sun but many fundamental questions remain unclear. For example, we still lack detailed understanding on why the outer solar atmosphere, the corona, is so hot (millions of degrees) while the solar surface is only few thousands of degrees. Furthermore, it is largely unkown how the corona is filled with mass and what drives the solar wind that supplies our planetary system with plasma and magnetic fields. It has been realised that a small layer in the solar atmosphere, the interface layer between the surface and the corona, may hold the key to answers to these questions. This interface layer, consisting of what is known as the chromosphere and transition region, is very shallow, only a few thousand kilometers but also very dynamic. Its complex dynamics are dominated by magnetic fields and radiative effects and is very challenging to understand. NASA has launched a small explorer spacecraft in the summer of 2013, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), which is specifically designed to observe this part of the solar atmosphere with unprecedented capabilities. However, IRIS is mostly sensitive to this small part of the atmosphere. We plan to provide key data that are essentially missing in the IRIS' arsenal: high-quality observations of the atmosphere below. These observations will be acquired through coordinated campaigns with the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope (SST) on La Palma. In addition, we will use large-scale, state of the art, computer simulations of the solar atmosphere in combination with advanced numerical tools to interpret the complex observational data. The combination of coordinated IRIS and SST observations and advanced numerical simulations will allow to construct a comprehensive picture of the solar atmosphere.
![](/rocs/english/projects/Soldyn/sst_sunrise.jpeg)
![Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph](/rocs/english/projects/Soldyn/iris_resized.jpeg)
Financing
The SOLDYN project is funded by the University of Oslo and the Research Council of Norway and runs from January 2016 to February 2023.
Cooperation
The SOLDYN project is closely integrated in the Rosseland Centre for Solar Physics (RoCS).