In our solar system, a hot, million-degree wind blows off the Sun at colossal speeds reaching millions of miles per hour, washing over the planets. The Earth’s magnetic field protects us by deflecting this wind, but other planetary bodies in the solar system have been exposed to its influence – for example, the Sun’s wind is known to have stripped Mars of its atmosphere.

The Sun loses over 10 trillion tonnes of material each year through its winds, so we are also interested in finding out how these winds contribute to a star’s evolution, and how they might influence the habitability of exoplanets around other Sun-like stars.

Magnetic waves, also known as Alfvén waves, can transfer energy through a star’s atmosphere and are considered an important feature of any magnetic star.

The RiPSAW project will use new methods drawn from statistics and machine learning to analyse high quality data of the Sun from state-of-the-art solar instruments, such as NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory and NCAR/HAO's Coronal Multi-Channel Polarimeter. The project will be undertaken in collaboration with scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Harvard Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in the United States, and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canaria in Spain.