IRSOL contributes to a fundamental project on an omnipresent natural phenomenon

What do an ocean storm, a nuclear magnetic resonance, the mobile phones network, economic crises and the surface of the Sun have in common? Waves. In every physical phenomenon of Nature, waves are omnipresent. From the simplest sinusoidal oscillations of a pure musical note to the most complex seismic waves caused by an earthquake, there is no natural phenomenon that does not involve some kind of oscillation. Each phenomenon, however, must be studied using methods of analysis peculiar to its discipline, from medicine to geology.

It is therefore not surprising that a team of 43 researchers, spanning 31 research institutes from 14 countries, has formed the working group WaLSA (Waves in the Lower Solar Atmosphere) to study the role of waves in the Sun. The team includes Dr. Oskar Steiner, who leads research on magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations of solar and stellar atmospheres at IRSOL (Istituto ricerche solari Aldo e Cele Daccò). The WaLSA team created a unified, open-access, open-source repository of many tools for analysing wave phenomena – WaLSAtools. It is available on GitHub and was presented in a seminal article (published in recent days by the prestigious journal Nature Reviews Methods Primers https://www.nature.com/articles/s43586-025-00392-0).

WaLSAtools, available to the entire scientific community, will allow researchers to access sophisticated tools adapted to each discipline, developing and sharing them, integrating theoretical developments and the most advanced machine learning techniques. In the name of interdisciplinarity: from the Sun to the human body, from stock exchanges to galaxies, there is no scientist who does not need to study some kind of wave.

Contatto: Dr. Oskar Steiner