COOS BAY, OR – Southwestern Oregon Community College invites the community to join us on Tuesday, April 14, 2026, at 6:00 pm, for “The Dynamic Solar Atmosphere” with Dr. Stephen Bradshaw, Professor and Associate Department Chair, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University. This lecture is a free event; all ages are welcome.
Coos County residents can join us in-person in the Umpqua Hall lecture room (room 184) on the Coos Campus, 1988 Newmark Ave., Coos Bay.
Curry County residents can join us for a watch party in the Community Room on the Curry Campus, 96082 Lone Ranch Parkway, Brookings.
For those not able to attend in person the lecture will be streamed live on the College’s YouTube channel at: www.youtube.com/@southwesternOR/streams.
About the Lecture:
Solar eclipses afforded the first opportunities to observe the sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona (“crown”), set clearly against the background sky, in the absence of the orders-of-magnitude brighter solar disk washing out its radiation. The astronomer George Claridge, writing in 1937, asserted that “Hardly a total eclipse of the sun occurs without some important observations being made which add to our knowledge of the atoms.”
Early discoveries included helium, some 25 years before it was found on Earth, and, in 1869, an observation that has yet to be fully understood to this day: Why, in apparent defiance of the laws of thermodynamics, is the corona a thousand times hotter than the sun’s surface?
Dr. Bradshaw will present some of the historical context to solar coronal physics; the mysteries astrophysicists have wrestled with through the decades; and an overview of our modern understanding of the sun’s atmosphere, reached via a fleet of space-based observatories that have revealed its multiscale properties and spectacular dynamics.
About the Presenter:
Professor Stephen Bradshaw is a faculty member at Rice University in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and serves as Chair of the Undergraduate Program. He completed his M.S. in Physics, with a specialization in Planetary and Space Physics, from Aberystwyth University in 2000 and received his Ph.D. in Solar Astrophysics from University of Cambridge in 2004. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Imperial College London and a research astrophysicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center prior to joining Rice in 2010.
Professor Bradshaw's research interests are primarily focused on theoretical and computational plasma physics applied to solar and stellar atmospheres, and to fundamental processes in laboratory plasmas relevant to astrophysical contexts. In particular, he investigates the heating of solar/stellar atmospheres where temperatures can reach several million degrees and yet surface temperatures are only a few thousand degrees. The mechanism by which such tremendous temperatures are achieved and maintained remains poorly understood. It is one of the great, unsolved mysteries of astrophysics to this day. His other research interests concern the mechanisms responsible for triggering and driving flares, and the heating and acceleration of solar/stellar winds, which are among the major contributors to space weather.
Professor Bradshaw has published numerous articles, book chapters, conference papers and has spoken all over the world from Beaumont, Texas to Bern, Switzerland. His projects (as PI and Co-I) have received over $10M in funding from NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF), and he received the prestigious NSF CAREER award. He is the lead project scientist for a mission designed to open a new window on the Sun's atmosphere in soft X-rays to be proposed to NASA's mid-sized explorer (MIDEX) opportunity.
For more information about the lecture series contact Dr. Aaron Coyner, Associate Professor, Physics and Engineering at aaron.coyner@socc.edu or 541-888-7244.
For more information on upcoming lectures contact Cassie Coyner, STEAM Pathways Coordinator, at 541-888-7416, or cassie.coyner@socc.edu .
To learn more about STEM degrees at Southwestern visit: https://www.socc.edu/programs-classes/stem/.
