Sun-Earth Day 2007 presents: Living in the Atmosphere of the Sun

TECHNOLOGY THROUGH TIME

Thousands of years of intellectual effort, and the advent of many new technologies, have revealed the sun and its family of planets as a physical system containing many interacting parts. Although the flows of matter and energy seem bewildering in their great numbers and complexity, they were revealed to us slowly over the course of 200 years as new scientific instruments and understandings matured. Today, we recognize dozens of different components to the Sun-Earth and Heliospheric systems. Some, like Earths' aurora, operate on scales of a few meters in space and a few seconds in time. Others, such as the heliopause, span billions of kilometers and years of time. Cataloging and quantifying the many components and phenomena in this system has taken decades of pains-taking effort by hundreds of scientists around the world. Like some enormous jigsaw puzzle, these pieces have to be fit into a comprehensive and logical picture that spans, not only the three dimensions of space, but also ordered in time. Some pieces, like aurora and solar flares, appear and disappear in time following specific laws of nature. Meanwhile, other phenomena, such as the rotation of the sun, or the sunspot cycle, have persisted for billions of years.

Advances in mathematics, physics and even computer science have shown us how the vast heliospheric system operates in the vastness of time and space. As the scientific questions about the sun have grown in number and subtlety, scientists working with NASA since the dawn of the Space Age, developed still more exotic instruments to study the sun, earth and heliosphere in ever-increasing detail. New insights about its stormy countenance, its sunspot cycles, and its interior structure began to emerge each year. Beyond heat and light, we now see the sun and the heliosphere that surrounds our planet, as a more complex player in the affairs of our own world. It can modify our climate, cause disruptions to our technology, and can even affect our health under certain conditions. This newer appreciation of the Sun-Earth connection and the heliosphere has been hard-won, and the product of thousands of observers and scientists across the centuries. As we look to the future, we can only wonder what new discoveries await us.