About the laboratory

You are on the website of the Solar Astronomy Laboratory of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. We study the Sun—basically, we're simply trying to understand how it works.

Strictly speaking, the Sun is the most studied object in astronomy. It's hard to believe, but there's a continuous series of scientific observations of the Sun that goes back almost 300 years. It's been going on since 1749, when the first systematic observations began: first at the Zurich Observatory, and then at the Bern Observatory (both Swiss cities). Many have heard of the solar cycle, and some even know that cycles have numbers. If, for example, as you read this, the cycle is numbered 25, 26, or even higher, that's how many cycles have passed since 1749. And people have observed all of these cycles.

At the same time, we've learned a lot about the Sun relatively recently. So, it was only about 100 years ago, at the beginning of the 20th century, that we learned that the Sun has a magnetic field (this was the first time a magnetic field was detected in space). It was only in the mid-20th century that we learned that the Sun has a hot corona. Before then, we thought it contained some mysterious chemical elements, and only in the 1940s did we realize that these were ordinary iron atoms altered beyond recognition by extreme temperatures. It was only in the 1950s that we first learned about the solar wind, and even later that the Sun is capable of ejecting enormous volumes of matter into space. Only towards the end of the 20th century did we begin to understand what the cosmic Sun is, completely unlike the one we see from Earth. And only in the 21st century did we begin to develop the first even vaguely accurate models of solar activity (flares, mass ejections).

There's still much we don't know. Why does the solar cycle have an 11-year period, and whether the Sun has always had one or simply triggers at certain points in its life? We know that stars like the Sun are capable of producing superflares—events hundreds and thousands of times more powerful than anything we see on the Sun now, but we don't understand what conditions are required for this and how often it can occur. Overall, though, it seems to us that we've been blessed with a fairly quiet star. Finally, we can't really predict solar events beyond two or three days. Models fall apart, and predictions fail. So there's still work to be done.

Basically, that's what we're doing. We trace our history as a scientific group back to roughly the late 1940s, when the first scientific instruments for recording cosmic solar radiation were launched in the USSR on the first R-1 rockets (copies of captured V-2 rockets). In total, during this time, three generations of laboratory staff have created several dozen scientific instruments for studying the Sun from Earth and space, and conducted a similar number of scientific experiments. We sincerely hope to find the time to describe at least the highlights of these pages here later—simply out of respect for the people who contributed their work and soul.

Currently, the laboratory maintains its historical status as one of the world's leading scientific centers in the field of solar physics and is the leading unit in our country in the field of heliophysical instrumentation.

The laboratory owns three online resources: two main ones—this website https://xras.ru/en and the Telegram channel https://t.me/lpixras (a quickly updated channel with comment support — in Russian, but has a built-in translation), and one backup—the group https://vk.com/lpixras (Russian only, occasionally updated). All materials on these resources are distributed on an open-access basis. The laboratory has no other websites or social media accounts.

The laboratory is open to proposals for collaboration in the fields of science and space instrumentation. In the department, you can also, if necessary, undergo scientific internship, as well as write diploma and qualification theses on the department’s topics.