Description du projet
Une étude systématique du fonctionnement interne de notre Soleil
Nous vivons autour d’une étoile magnétique active, notre Soleil. Sa variabilité et ses éruptions volcaniques ont un impact direct sur le climat de la Terre et sur notre société technologique. Malgré des décennies de recherches intenses, des questions fondamentales, concernant notamment le mode de fonctionnement du Soleil ou la relation entre son cycle magnétique et sa chaude atmosphère dynamique, demeurent sans réponse. Le projet Whole Sun, financé par l’UE, a pour objectif de répondre pour la première fois à de telles questions clés dans leur ensemble. Le projet réunira des physiciens de renommée mondiale dans ce domaine afin d’approfondir la compréhension de notre Soleil et d’étendre ces connaissances à ses jumeaux. Le projet prévoit de construire le code solaire multi-résolution le plus avancé afin de traiter conjointement les aspects macrophysiques et microphysiques de la dynamique solaire.
Objectif
We live around an active magnetic star, our Sun, that has a direct impact on our technological society through its variability and eruptive behaviour. Despite decades of intense research, fundamental questions such as How does the Sun work? Why does it possess a magnetic cycle and a dynamic hot atmosphere and how they are interrelated? remain mostly unanswered. In the Whole Sun project, we aim at tackling these key questions as a coherent whole for the first time. For too many years, the Sun has been split into internal and external solar physics topics lacking a global integrated view of its complex plasma dynamics. For instance, dynamo simulations seeking to answer the origin of the magnetic field and of its cyclic behaviour neglect surface physics and the existence of sunspots and likewise surface models often assume the magnetic field as a given input without the detailed knowledge of the nonlinear interplay between convection, rotation and magnetic fields in the Sun’s outer envelope. The time has come to gather European world leading solar/stellar physicists to build a deeper understanding of our star and to extend it to its twins. To do so many bottlenecks must be addressed: highly disparate spatial and temporal scales, physical interfaces of all solar layers, complex microphysics and global effects, strong dynamics and how parameters such as star’s metallicity, mass and rotation influence the outcome. By gathering physicists from each side of the solar surface we aim at tackling these challenging, beyond the state-of-the-art problems, by developing a deep theoretical understanding of our star and of its analogues and by building the most advanced multi-resolution solar code in order to jointly address global/macrophysics and local/microphysics aspects of the solar dynamics. The advent of Exa-scale computers makes such a challenge within our reach as do modern analysis methods to interpret observations and 4-D data cube that the project will produce or access.
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ERC-SyG - Synergy grantInstitution d’accueil
75015 PARIS 15
France