Heliophysics: Active Stars, their Astrospheres, and Impacts on Planetary Environments

Description

Heliophysics is a fast-developing scientific discipline that integrates studies of the Sun's variability, the surrounding heliosphere, and the environment and climate of planets. This volume, the fourth in the Heliophysics collection, explores what makes the conditions on Earth 'just right' to sustain life, by comparing Earth to other solar system planets, by comparing solar magnetic activity to that of other stars, and by looking at the properties of evolving exoplanet systems. By taking an interdisciplinary approach and using comparative heliophysics, the authors illustrate how we can learn about our local cosmos by looking beyond it, and in doing so, also enable the converse. Supplementary online resources are provided, including lecture presentations, problem sets and exercise labs, making this ideal as a textbook for advanced undergraduate- and graduate-level courses, as well as a foundational reference for researchers in the many subdisciplines of helio- and astrophysics.

Carolus J. Schrijver is a Senior Fellow at Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center, California, where his work focuses primarily on the magnetic field in the solar atmosphere. His research includes the dynamics of the magnetic field at and above the solar surface, how that shapes the heliosphere, and how it powers solar eruptions that are the drivers of space storms around the Earth. Dr Schrijver is involved in several NASA missions to better understand the Sun and the heliosphere. He is co-editor of the first three books in this series, and has published a popular science book entitled Living with the Stars (2015) on the multitude of connections between the human body, the Earth, the planets, and the stars. Frances Bagenal is Professor of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research comprises the synthesis of data analysis and theory in the study of space plasmas, and she has specialized in the fields of planetary magnetospheres and the solar corona. Professor Bagenal has been involved in NASA missions to planetary objects including Voyager, Galileo, and Deep Space 1, and she is an investigator on the New Horizons mission to Pluto, and the Juno mission to Jupiter. Jan J. Sojka is Department Head of the Department of Physics at Utah State University. His research explores how our upper atmosphere and its ionosphere are coupled with the magnetosphere and driven by the Sun and solar wind in an effort to unravel impacts on our technologies, focusing particularly on the modeling of the ionosphere and its couplings and drivers, to enable assessments of how well our theories conform to reality. For over four decades, Professor Sojka has been involved with sounding rockets, and magnetospheric and ionospheric satellite missions, as well as numerous ground-based facilities. He is currently Co-Investigator on the NASA SDOs EVE instrument observing the X-EUV solar irradiance.