The Sun revealed

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The sun is a little more accessible today, if only because some of the experts who know it best have been meeting during the whole of the week to share their knowledge and unravel its secrets. This afternoon saw the closure of the IV SOLARNET Meeting "The Sun from its interior to its outer atmosphere" organized by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), and the last of a series of conferences in the European SOLARNET network, dedicated to the study of our local star. Almost 200 scientists from 18 countries made Arrecife the epicentre of Solar Physics.

"The idea of the meeting" explains Elena Khomenko, a researcher at the IAC and the President of the Scientific Committee "has been essentially to understand the Sun as a whole". The conference was divided into numerous specialized talks taking in, globally, the physical processes and the phenomena observed in the solar atmosphere up till now. All of this with the aim of uniting knowledge and technology so that the 150 million kilometers separating us from the Sun will be no impediment to its study.

"We are happy", comments Marian Martínez, who is also a researcher at the IAC and co-President of the Scientific Committee "to have brought together at this meetings scientists specializing in very different subjects. For example we had members of a small community dedicated to space weather". This was one of the themes covered in the two final sessions of the conference, and which includes research into a very hot topic: how solar storms affect our telecommunications systems here on Earth.

Another of the key subjects during the last day was the instrumentation and the solar telescopes of the future, among which we should underline the European Solar Telescope (EST). With its primary mirror of 4m diameter it will be the biggest telescope of its type in Europa and will enable us to make unprecedented observations to better understand the physical processes which dominate the plasma in the outer layers of the Sun.

More information at the IV SOLARNET meeting web: http://www.iac.es/congreso/solarnet-4meeting/

Previous press releases and photonews:

Helioseismology and the solar magnetic cycle open the IV SOLARNET meeting in Lanzarote

The 4th SOLARNET meeting "The physics of the Sun from the interior to the outer atmosphere" will start next Monday

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