I would have to say that because we have multiple observatories watching the Sun from different distances and with different filters so that we can see the many colors of light, AND we can measure particles like electrons and protons, the science of "heliophysics" that ties together what the Sun does and how it affects the solar system environment. One of our newer probes, the Parker Solar Probe, is getting closer and closer to the Sun, and is providing new information on the solar wind. If you want to learn more about this mission, you could go to either or both of these websites:
http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/
https://www.nasa.gov/cont...d/parker-solar-probe
Amazingly, although not specifically designed for this, the Parker Solar Probe (some call it PSP) has given us new views of Venus!

Hi Michael,

Some of the Solar Week scientists don't actually study the Sun directly. Some of us are focused on understanding the interaction between the solar wind and Earth's magnetosphere, and how this produces geomagnetic storms. In this area, we currently are getting a lot of exciting results from NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) Mission. The main objective of MMS is to understand a process called magnetic reconnection that plays a very important role in how energy from the solar wind is transferred into Earth's magnetosphere to drive the aurora borealis (northern lights), aurora australis (southern lights) and geomagnetic storms. The really interesting thing about magnetic reconnection is that it is a physical process that occurs in plasmas throughout the universe. Not only does understanding magnetic reconnection help us understand what makes the northern and southern lights, it can also help us understand what causes solar storms like coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and solar flares on the Sun.

https://www.nasa.gov/miss...pages/mms/index.html

Kris

Hi - see my reply as well under "most interesting recent work", about people who are digging into very old records and manuscripts and even archeology to study what the Sun was doing hundreds or even thousands of years ago.