What is it about?
One might think that the Sun is so huge that measuring brightness changes is trivial, but it turns out to be quite tricky: ground-based observations are affected by the atmosphere, and while science teams have developed some sophisticated satellite-borne sensors, space is a brutal place and those sensors can not be brought back into the lab to be recalibrated. To tease out the signal, we employ a Bayesian state space model to develop a reconstruction of solar brightness that best agrees with the various data sources we have available, holistically estimating overall uncertainty along the way.
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Why is it important?
The Sun is a crucial non-human driver of climate. While the trend of solar brightness was previously uncertain, a finding of a negative trend suggests that the climate may have actually cooled slightly over the past few decades, if not for humans activity. Improving our records of the effects of the Sun, volcanos, etc. leads to more accurate climate models that better estimate the human contribution to climate change.
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This page is a summary of: Negative trend in total solar irradiance over the satellite era, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, March 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2417155122.
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