The Sun Reveals Our Connection to the Cosmos - First Fridays

For more than 400 years, astronomers have studied the sun from afar. But astronomers have come a long, long way in studying the corona. We no longer have to wait for the moon to block out the bright disk of the sun's light -- that is to say, total solar eclipses –to catch any glimpse of the less bright corona. Now, astrophysicists will actually be able to sample the corona directly because NASA is sending a spacecraft to go there. The name of the mission is the Parker Solar Probe. It's a heat-resistant spacecraft designed to plunge deep into the sun's atmosphere where it can sample solar wind and magnetism first hand. The two mysteries prompting this mission are the high temperature of the sun's corona and the puzzling acceleration of the solar wind. In this talk, Dr. Guhathakurta will provide an overview of why we study the Sun.

Madhulika (Lika) Guhathakurta is an American astrophysicist and scientist with NASA's Heliophysics Science Division. She was the lead program scientist for NASA's Living With a Star initiative and serves as program scientist on the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), Van Allen Probes, and Solar TErrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) missions. Lika was previously the program scientist on SPARTAN-201 (Shuttle Point Autonomous Research Tool for Astronomy-201), a free-flying science instrument platform designed to study velocity and acceleration of the solar wind and observe the sun's corona. Dr. Guhathakurta is known for her work in heliophysics, where she has authored over 70 publications on the subject.

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