59: Living With A Star

The Sun — so close, we can almost touch it. (Don't, that would be bad.) Yet astronomers have so much to learn about our nearest star. Just a few weeks ago, the ESA Solar Orbiter launched, off on a mission to orbit the sun (hence the name) and catch a good look at the Sun's poles for the first time. It joins the Parker Solar Probe, which is lining up to take some deep dives nice and close to the Sun. And to top it all off, the world's largest ground-based solar observatory, the Daniel K. Inouye Telescope, just took some a-maz-ing images of the Sun's surface.

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Syzygy is produced by Chris Stewart and co-hosted by Dr Emily Brunsden from the Department of Physics at the University of York.

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Things we talked about in this episode:

Come to Syzygy live, 16 May, at the Northern Podcast Festival 

Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope

Stunning images of the Sun’s surface

Solar corona

Heliosphere

ESA’s Solar Orbiter

Video of the Solar Orbiter’s mission

Parker Solar Probe mission

Sun’s magnetic poles about to flip