Stellar and Solar Physics

Our team aims at providing answers to some key questions of solar and stellar physics, such as the heating process of the corona or the structure of solar and stellar interiors. The magnetic field playing a fundamental role in structuring the atmospheres of solar-type stars, it becomes possible to understand the coupling between the internal generation of magnetic field and its external signatures. The two major research topics are thus the dynamic and internal structure of the Sun and stars, and diagnostic and heating of the outer layers.

Dernières news

Successful Solar Orbiter gravity assist manoeuvre at Venus

2 months 3 days ago

Since its launch in 2020, Solar Orbiter has carried out a number of gravity assists at Earth and Venus to gradually shrink its orbit and bring it closer to the Sun, but never before has it come as close to a planet as it did on 18 February 2025, when it came within just 379 km of Venus. For comparison, astronauts aboard the International Space Station orbit the Earth at an average altitude of 408 km.

Start of the integration phase of the flight model cameras on the PLATO Optical Bench at Oberpfaffenhofen site of OHB System

1 year 1 month ago

How many earth-like planets orbit the habitable zone of solar-like stars? How planets form and evolve in their planetary systems? What about the interaction with their stars? These are among the questions the ESA PLATO mission is called to answer, through exquisite measurements of exoPLAnet Transits and Oscillations of stars (you now know the origin of the PLATO acronym). The “transit” measurements yield information on the size of the planets, while the “stellar oscillations” give us the mass and age of the stars, which in turn are fundamental to assess the mass and age of the hosted planets. The exquisite quality of all such measurements is secured by 26 ultra large field-of-view cameras that make the eyes of the PLATO mission.

Never 2 without 3! Three PLATO Flight cameras were tested in 2023

1 year 4 months ago

During 2023, IAS was able to test 3 Flight cameras (PFM, FM4, FM5) at the Calibration Station. The last camera was finished testing in the second week of December. All of the tests of these cameras took a little over 6 months, during which thermal vacuum tests were carried out as well as scientific performance tests. A team of about twenty people from IAS and the Station worked to enable these tests. Congratulations to all for this major achievement!

Camera ‘hack’ lets Solar Orbiter peer deeper into Sun’s atmosphere

1 year 7 months ago

A last minute modification of the EUI (Extreme Utraviolet Imager) instrument on board the Solar Orbiter mission provides new views of our star's corona. The corona is a very tenuous medium and dedicated telescopes called coronagraphs are needed to observe it. FSI (Full Sun Imager), the wide angle channel of EUI, is the first coronagraph imaging in the extreme UV.

Solar snake spotted slithering across Sun’s surface

2 years 5 months ago

The EUI (Extreme Ultraviolet Imager) instrument on board the Solar Orbiter mission keeps on revealing new types of phenomena in the solar atmosphere. Last in date, an event nicknamed ‘the snake’ features the propagation of a bright front at 170 km/s along a twisted structure know as a ‘filament’, a tube of cool plasma maintained above the surface in the hot corona by the magnetic field.

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