Media Contact: Matthew Bragulla, matthew.bragulla.004@my.csun.edu, or Javier Rojas, javier.rojas@csun.edu

The sun affects every aspect of Earth and, by default, every aspect of human life. As the Earth continues to experience drastic shifts to its climate, more research has arisen to explain the sun’s role in all of this. 

A graduate student from California State University, Northridge and a researcher from the University of Colorado Boulder are working to develop a model to explain how changes in the sun’s surface affects Earth’s atmosphere, weather, and magnetic field. The twist? They’re utilizing artificial intelligence to analyze the patterns of the surface. 

It started with University of Colorado Boulder astrophysicist Shah Bahauddin, who received funding from the NASA program Solar Irradiance Science Team (SIST). Bahauddin said SIST asks for proposals from universities that involve analyzing and creating predictions for solar irradiance, which is light energy that travels from the sun as electromagnetic radiation.  

“The idea is to develop a physical model that will be able to help us connect whatever is happening inside the sun, or mainly the surface of the sun, and how much light it will produce based on that,” Bahauddin said. 

He added that it’s important to make predictions about solar irradiance because it directly affects our space weather as well as the climate change.

CSUN computer science graduate student Ishay Haykeen took on the role of developing the AI algorithm that will make the connections between the pictures and spacecraft data. He said he was looking to work on a project involving Artificial Intelligence and physics, and California State University, Northridge Department Chair of Physics and Astronomy and Professor of Physics and Astronomy Debi Prasad Choudhary connected him with Bahauddin. 

“The next step we are already working on, which is almost finished, is calculating the total solar irradiance. And we calculate that according to the number of pixels that are sunspots and sun faculae,” Haykeen said. 

Bahauddin wanted to know the physics behind solar irradiance to make the predictions and is basing the project off of data from the past 50 years. 

“The idea is that you look at different features of the sun,” Bahauddin said. “So, the sun has sunspots and bright structures, which are called Faculae. And then from there we calculate ‘If I have sunspot, I will have a reduction of the sunlight. If there are bright points there will be an increase in sunlight,’”

However, analyzing the surface of the sun used to be done manually by looking at pictures of the sun taken by a telescope, finding faculae and sunspots, and logging in data. He instead proposed using data from an instrument on the International Space Station called TSIS-1, which measures the total amount of sunlight that falls on Earth and using a deep learning algorithm to connect the patterns between the pictures and the irradiance level data. 

Bahauddin and Haykeen have been working on this project for the past seven months and will be presenting their data to the 2025 Sun-Climate Symposium, hosted in Fairbanks, Alaska on Sept 15-19. There, more than 200 scientists from around the world will convene, share their own models, collaborate and critique each other’s work. 

Bahauddin and Haykeen have accomplished a lot in their first year of the project and have received funding from NASA for three years.

Calculating the total solar irradiance is only first part of their entire project. The second part of their plan is to analyze spectral solar irradiance, which involves breaking down sunlight into individual spectrums and calculating its energy. 

 “Each of the colors, each of the parts of the spectrum has different implications. For example, the infrared heats up the surface of the earth, so that basically causes the greenhouse effect,” Bahauddin explained. “And if you look at the UV light, it is basically affecting the ozone sphere, which protects us from getting cancer from the sunlight. If you look at the extreme ultraviolet light, it is affecting the thermosphere, or the upper part of the atmosphere where all the satellites are. We have a lot of satellites there and they need protection from the extreme solar irradiance.”

Bahauddin and Ishay said they will do this by looking at the decades of pictures and data that CSUN has collected. 

“CSUN has 35 years of data from San Fernando Observatory, which is very valuable. Bahauddin said. “I don’t think nobody else in the world has anything like this” 

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