Our star, the Sun, is essential for the life on Earth. Its magnetic and radiative activity has an enormous impact on planetary magnetospheres and ionospheres, ranging from subtle climate dependencies to severe radiation phenomena affecting operations and safety of our technologies on Earth. Also, thanks to its proximity, its study is crucial for our understanding of the other stars.
In this talk I will present the work conducted in the context of the SunDish project, which aims to map and monitor the Sun at high radio frequencies (K-band 18-26 GHz) with the Italian Sardinia and Medicina Radio Telescopes. To date, we acquired more than 350 solar maps filling the observational gap in the field of chromospheric imaging at these frequencies. Early science results include the first accurate measurements of
the quiet Sun brightness level in the K-band and a compiled a catalog of radio continuum solar imaging observations including the identification of active regions, their brightness and spectral characterization.
In our studies we are comparing our results with a recently updated flare catalog, based on GOES data, in order to investigate correlations between our data in K-band and the flares detections. An example of an interesting case is the active region NOAA 12785 on November 23rd 2020: we observed an unusual and very soft spectrum and just a few hours later a C-class flare occurred arising from the same bright region.