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I'm Nicholeen Viall. I work at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and I study the Sun.  

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In one way or another, the Sun affects pretty much everything going on here on Earth.

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There wouldn't even be life here on Earth without the Sun.

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One big example of how the Sun affects the Earth is space weather. One of the cool effects of 

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space weather is the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights. 

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I've always been interested in astronomy and studying the stars and the Sun and the solar system.

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When I was in eighth grade, I had one of those "what do I want to be when I grew up" writing assignments

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in my English class. And so 
I wrote about wanting to be an astrophysicist,

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but at the time, I didn't even 
know that that was what it was called.  

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And I came home, and I was talking to my parents about that I wanted to study the stars and  

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galaxies and planets, and how they're formed, and what they're made of.  And my Dad said, 

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"Well, that's called being an astrophysicist, and 
you need to go get your Ph.D. in physics."

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And so I did. Through grad school, I danced at ballet. I felt like it was a good way to access the creative  

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part of my brain. It turns out there's a lot of 
creativity that's needed in science

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because you're exploring space and questions that nobody has really thought through before. 

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And so you kind of have to use your imagination to think of all the different possibilities.

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That's how we refine our ideas about how the universe works. 

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And I think that's just so cool. I just think it's so, so cool.

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(music playing)