When we look at the Sun we cannot penetrate beyond its outer surface, the photosphere, which emits the photons that make up the radiation we can see. So how can we find out what is inside it?

When scientists realised that observing and analysing oscillations in the Sun could provide information about its interior, it was only a matter of time before Helioseismology was put to work on other stars

One hundred and fifty experts in Solar and Stellar Seismology from over twenty countries will converge on Lanzarote from the 1st to the 5th February for the 4th HELAS International Conference, organised by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC)

ESA's Herschel Space Observatory was launched on 14 May 2009. After a short commissioning and performance verification period, the science demonstration observations started in September 2009. Herschel is now carrying out routine science observations. The three instruments (SPIRE, PACS and HIFI) are working extremely well. The IAC is part of the SPIRE and PACS instrument consortia and has contributed flying hardware and software. The first results of the many Herschel Key Projects were presented at the ESLAB 2010 symposium in ESTEC (May 2010) and have been published in July 2010 in a special

We present a visual determination of the number of bright points (BPs) existing in the quiet Sun, which are structures thought to trace intense kG magnetic concentrations. The measurement is based on a 0farcs1 angular resolution G-band movie obtained with the Swedish Solar Telescope at the solar disk center. We find 0.97 BPs Mm-2, which is a factor 3 larger than any previous estimate. It corresponds to 1.2 BPs per solar granule. Depending on the details of the segmentation, the BPs cover between 0.9% and 2.2% of the solar surface. Assuming their field strength to be 1.5 kG, the detected BPs

In a recently published differential analysis (see ApJ, 724, 1536, Dec. 1 issue) , we have derived abundance corrections for iron lines, using synthetic spectra from solar magnetoconvection simulations that were performed via running the Copenhagen stagger-code on massively-parallel clusters. The series of 3D snapshots used for the spectral synthesis covers 2.5 solar hours in the statistically stationary regime of the convection.Crucially, we show that the effect of magnetic fields on solar abundancedeterminations can not be neglected. This is equally valid for all three different Fe