David Elder Lecture - Dr Iain Hannah

Solar Eclipses and the Sun’s Million-Degree Mystery

Dr. Iain Hannah, University of Glasgow

During a total solar eclipse, the moon perfectly blocks out the Sun’s bright surface, revealing its faint outer atmosphere, the corona. Observations of the corona reveal one of the greatest mysteries in solar physics: while the Sun’s visible surface is at temperatures of thousands of degrees, the corona somehow reaches temperatures over a million degrees. Understanding how the Sun’s atmosphere is heated has been a major challenge for decades, pointing to fundamental processes that continuously release enormous amounts of energy.

In this talk, I will explore the history of the coronal heating problem and discuss some of the leading ideas for its solution. Using spectacular images and movies from the latest space missions, I will show how modern solar telescopes are transforming our understanding of the Sun, while explaining why observations made during total solar eclipses remain scientifically valuable today.

About the speaker

Dr. Iain Hannah is a Senior Lecturer in the Astronomy & Astrophysics group at the University of Glasgow and former Royal Society Research Fellow. His research focuses on the Sun’s atmosphere, particularly how it changes rapidly during solar flares and activity evolves over the 11-year solar cycle. He studies these processes using observations from ESA's Solar Orbiter mission and NASA's RHESSI and NuSTAR X-ray telescopes, together with numerical simulations. Dr. Hannah studied for both his undergraduate degree and PhD at the University of Glasgow before taking up his first postdoctoral position at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2013, he was awarded the Royal Astronomical Society's Fowler Geophysics Prize for his contributions to solar physics.

About the David Elder Lectures

Glasgow Science Centre is proud to host the David Elder Lectures in partnership with the University of Strathclyde's Department of Physics. This lecture is open to adults and interested young adults. Please ensure you arrive at least 10 minutes before the event begins. After the start the doors will be closed and access will not be permitted.