Public Lectures

Did you know the Sun has hairs? Well, they’re not actually hairs, but they look like them. Solar spicules are thread-like features that stick out from the surface of the Sun. Physically, spicules are hot plasma contained within very small tubes of magnetic flux sticking up out of the Sun’s surface. They sometimes look similar to solar prominences and filaments, but are about 400 times smaller. They were first observed on the Sun’s limb (edge) in 1871 but have been studied more intensely beginning in the 1970’s. Since then, we’ve learned a lot more about them and identified what they look like on the Sun’s disk (center) by analyzing their spectral signatures.

This talk will go over what solar spicules are, why we care about them, and how we observe them. It will cover the different wavelengths we use to observe them, how we can combine observations to learn about spicules over their whole lifetimes, where this data analysis can take us, and current/future missions to gather more observations.