Dr Paweł Preś, an astronomer at the University of Wrocław, talks about the importance of keeping a close eye on our closest star.
Jan Pelczar: Why do you never let the sun out of your sight?
Paweł Preś: A scientist is constantly on the front line.
You mean you observe the sun for military reasons?
No, the front line of science is where we come up against something no one has studied before. Where we can check which elements of commonly-accessible knowledge actually match our observations, and which elements need to be described more accurately. In order to start thinking, you need to look more closely. After many trials and errors, which take a lot of time, you may come up with the right idea. These days, states and institutions are engaged in the pursuit of science, but research work used to be an exclusive occupation. Only the elite, the most affluent people could afford to do it. Nicolaus Copernicus was supported by the Catholic Church, so he could spend his nights making observations and calculations. Johannes Hevelius owned a brewery, so he built telescopes out of passion and spent his time gazing at the sky. In those days, science was something pursued only by the economic aristocracy. Now, there is a whole system of support for scientific research. A certain percentage of people can devote themselves to working only as scientists. An arduous job, quite distant from the lustre of popular-science lectures. We sit and observe, we test hypotheses, and we try to come up with ideas.
We depend on the sun. These days, there’s probably no other piece of common scientific knowledge that doesn’t meet even with the slightest objection. The importance of the sun is certainly not in the same category as the Earth being spherical, vaccines being useful, or climate change being harmful. It’s absolute knowledge. There’s no escaping it. If there were no sun, we would not be here. But most people still don’t realize how powerful an object it is, in every respect. It’s a star.
A death star?
If we directed all of the sun’s energy at the Earth, the planet would evaporate completely in 11 days. Any decent-sized solar flare, which represents a fraction of the overall solar production, would instantly cause all the oceans on our planet to boil.
Where does such power come from?
The sun itself generates energy. Planets do so too, but on a completely different level. The difference is of tremendous magnitude. The sun produces energy through nuclear fusion, a powerful phenomenon that generates enormous amounts of energy. I’m not sure
