The European Research Council (ERC) has selected the project “The Whole Sun”, proposed by five European Institutions, one of them the IAC, to award one of its prestigious Synergy Grants. The IAC researcher and Professor at the ULL Fernando Moreno Insertis, is the Principal Investigator of the IAC team which took part in the proposal. The project celebrated its inaugural meeting recently in Paris. The grant is for six years.
The aim of the project “The whole Sun” is to link the computational and theoretical models of the interior, the lower atmosphere, and the corona of the Sun to obtain a qualitative jump in our understanding of the structure, the working, and the physics of our star. Each of the five institutions participating in the collaboration have long experience in the different zones of the Sun to be studied within this project, but the techniques and methods which are to be used to make advances in each zone are very different. It is necessary to combine them to make advances in the many still unknown aspects of solar behaviour. Central to this research is to understand how the magnetic field is generated in the centre of the sun, and how it rises from there through the photosphere and the corona into the interplanetary medium. Discovering the key to these processes also has a practical motive: to understand the origin within the Sun of the phenomena that end up as solar storms and affect the Earth, which we still do not know how to predict and which are potentially very dangerous for our society.
The project “The Whole Sun” will be carried out between 2019 and 2025. The IAC is a partner instition in this project, whose Principal Investigator coordinator centre is the Commissariat for Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies (CEA) at Saclay (France) and in which the other befitting institutions are the Rosseland Centre for Solar PHysics (University of Oslo, Norway), the Univefsity of St. Andrews, (Scotland) and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research of Göttingen (Germany).
Fernando Moreno Insertis is Doctor from the University of Munich (Germany) having carried out the research for his doctoral thesis at the Max Planck Institute of Astrophysics in Garching (Germany). He has obtained grants in the past from European organizations, outstanding among them being his role as Coordinator General in the successful “Solaire” network, a Marie Curie network in the 6th Framework programme of the European Commission which took place between 2007 and 2011 in which there were 13 participating European research centres with some 170 researchers. Moreno Insertis has wide experience in studies of solar physics. His field is the physics of fluids and of magnetized plasma in astrophysics. His research covers phenomena of the emergence of magnetized plasma in the interior of the Sun to the magneto hydrodynamic processes in the solar atmosphere including the corona.
ERC Grants
Among the programmes of support by the European Research Council for scientific projects with international impact the ERC Synergy Grants are those with the largest financial awards. They are research projects in any scientific field proposed by consortia formed by European institutions in which it has to be shown that there is a synergy derived from the coordination of efforts between them which will ensure a major advance which could not be achieved if they worked individually.
Contacto: Fernando Moreno Insertis: fmi [at] iac.es (fmi[at]iac[dot]es) (mailto: fmi [at] iac.es (fmi[at]iac[dot]es))
