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Heliophysics Courses

NASA's Living With a Star Program (LWS) and UCAR Community Programs' Cooperative Programs for the Advancement of Earth System Science (CPAESS) partnered in 2006 to launch the Heliophysics Summer School. Over the 20 years of the Heliophysics Summer School, CPAESS has compiled an extensive set of materials from these lecturers and topics across all the domains of heliophysics and related fields. Topics covered span the domains from solar/stellar interiors and dynamos to planetary atmospheres, touch on the unifying principles of heliophysics such as plasma processes or particle acceleration, and include observations and instrumentation. These expert lectures are all collected on the CPAESS Heliophysics Summer School Resources page.

A subset of the online materials developed through the Heliophysics Summer School has been organized into three different learning pathways. These pathways provide some of the foundational principles of heliophysics. We think they are a good introduction to the field. Each pathway provides links to lecture slides and a video recording of the lecture, suggested readings from the Summer School textbooks, and connections to other topics within and across pathways.

Three Pathways

 

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Heliophysics by Domain

Heliophysics is often organized into different domains based on location, methodologies, and data sources. These broadly are divided into: solar physics and the corona, the solar wind near the Sun and in interplanetary space, Earth and planetary magnetospheres, Earth and planetary ionospheres. While these domains are often treated separately, they are interconnected, share the same plasma processes involved, and are all part of the heliophysics system.

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Heliophysics by Plasma Physics and Processes

Models of plasma physics and plasma processes apply across a broad range of heliophysics topics. These processes and models include: Magneto-hydrodynamics (MHD), kinetic theory, particle acceleration, radiative processes, and magnetic reconnection. This pathway focuses on those as examples.

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Heliophysics by Observations and Data Sources

This pathway presents the different types of observations used in heliophysics and isare often broken into its domains and subdomains, depending on the type of measurements: in situ plasma measurements, electric and magnetic fields, energetic particles, remote imagery across different parts of the EM spectrum, and radio astronomy.

Textbooks

There are two reference sources utilized in the pathways above.  

Heliophysics I-IV

Heliophysics Volumes, available at Cambridge University Press, includes 4 volumes that are compilations of chapters written by the original lecturers for the Summer School. Each volume focuses on a particularly unifying theme. These volumes are only available in physical copies. 

Citation: Schrijver, C. J., & Siscoe, G. L. (Eds.). (2010–2012). Heliophysics (3-volume set). Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9781107695009.

  • Vol. 1: Plasma Physics of the Local Cosmos
  • Vol. 2: Space Storms and Radiation: Causes and Effects
  • Vol. 3: Evolving Solar Activity and the Climates of Space and Earth
  • Vol. 4: Active Stars, their Astrospheres, and Impacts on Planetary Environments
    Citation: Schrijver, C. J., Bagenal, F., & Sojka, J. J. (Eds.). (2016). Heliophysics: Active Stars, their Astrospheres, and Impacts on Planetary Environments (Vol. 4). Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9781107462397

Principles of Heliophysics

Principles of Heliophysics - Referred to as “Principles” in the pathways, this is an e-book compilation of excerpts from the textbooks above, highlighting some of the most important unifying principles of Heliophysics.  This is available for download from "arXiv" (the Astrophysics preprint archive).

Citation: Schrijver, K., et al. (2019). Principles of Heliophysics: A Textbook on the Universal Processes Behind Planetary Habitability. arXiv:1910.14022. https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.14022 

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