Understanding the Invisible: Space & Science

The Sun doesn’t just shine - it’s constantly sending out bursts of energy and streams of charged particles into space. When these reach Earth, they can trigger what scientists call space weather: storms in space that interact with Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere.
In this talk, I’ll explore what space weather is, where it comes from, and why it matters for modern life. We’ll look at how solar storms travel across millions of kilometres from the Sun to Earth, what happens when they collide with our planet’s magnetic shield, and why this can lead to beautiful aurora - but also real-world problems. Space weather can disrupt satellites, interfere with GPS and radio communications, and in extreme cases even affect power grids on the ground.
I’ll also discuss how scientists study something we can’t see directly, using spacecraft, global measurements, and computer models to track and understand these storms. Finally, I’ll touch on how new approaches, including artificial intelligence, are helping us improve space weather forecasting as our reliance on technology continues to grow.
Space weather is a reminder that Earth doesn’t exist in isolation - we live under the influence of an active star, and its storms reach much closer to home than most of us realise.

In life, as in science, we constantly have to make decisions about the world around us based on the information we receive. And in life, as in science, we can make bad decisions because we adapted a wrong model as we process the information. In this talk we will look into what makes a good model and how one can advance in research by extracting most information from the data.