2021 Einstein Lecture

Professor iver Cairns will be speaking at the 2021 Einstein Lecture which is presented this year by the School of Physics at UNSW as part of National Sciences Week.

He will discuss activity on the Sun’s surface which creates a type of weather called space weather. Taking the form of solar flares, coronal mass ejections, bursts of X-rays, radio waves, and energetic particles that travel across interplanetary space, space weather effects at the Earth in significant ways. It damages and increases drag on satellites, causes electrical blackouts, and it also produces the Earth’s aurora.

Although the Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field protects us from the majority of solar wind effects, astronauts do not have the same protection from solar radiation and galactic cosmic rays. The risks from space weather to humans travelling to and living on Mars are thus large.