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Swiss Virtual Institute for Solar Science (SVISS) is the organization for promoting solar physics in Switzerland and for advancing national and international cooperation in solar physics and related sciences.

Solar physics is a discipline with relations to several other branches of science because of the uniqueness of the Sun: it is the only star that can be explored in great detail, and being the main energy source of our solar system it affects everything in our cosmic neighborhood.

The Sun is often called the “Rosetta Stone of astrophysics”, since many astrophysical processes and tools that are needed for exploring and understanding the more distant universe are initially discovered, explored, and tested in the astrophysical laboratory that the Sun provides. Examples are the atomic-physics and radiative-transfer tools that are needed for analyzing astrophysical spectra, the plasma physics, dynamo, and acceleration processes that also occur in various forms elsewhere in the universe, magnetic variability and structuring, heating processes and the generation of stellar winds, and asteroseismology to determine the internal structure of stars.

The Sun with its solar wind, eruptions and coronal mass ejections governs the violently fluctuating space weather, which is a major factor to reckon with for all manned space travel. The magnetic variability of the Sun also influences its brightness, which affects the Earth’s ozone layer and the global climate in the troposphere. For the quantitative understanding of global climate change and the man-made greenhouse effect one needs to properly identify and sort out the component in the global climate system that is linked to the variable solar irradiance. This hot topic has led to collaborations between solar physicist and climatologists.