Solar Physics
I'm currently involved in a physics project to build a magnetometer. The hope is that we'll be able to predict geomagnetic activity and maybe auroras. I'm mainly involved in researching the theory behind what we're doing and why we get auroras and how the solar wind works etc. This is fascinating stuff, and we're going to be blogging about this regularly (hopefully, we all know how that goes).
Here's a snippet from our first theory post:
"The Sun, the solar wind, the Earth’s magnetic field – extending 100,000 km into space – and the aurora. This is a startling collection of hugely interesting, and complicated, wonders and no small remit to explain theoretically. Even today we don’t fully understand the interaction between the solar wind (a constant stream of magnetised plasma being sloughed off of the Sun’s corona) and the protective magnetosphere of our planet. Nevertheless, we can analyse some of the simplest and important ideas – it’s really the subtleties that haven’t been figured out yet.
... So all that is to come: the Coulomb force, the Lorentz force, Maxwell’s equations and maybe even vector calculus and fluid dynamics. No-one said that solar physics was easy! Before closing though, I really want to stress that this is absolutely not dry or dull. We are discussing a massive mess of complexity and succeeding with only a handful of tools. We are analysing one of the most amazing events in our solar system: the huge amount of energy generated by the Sun literally imparts some particles with enough energy to exceed escape velocity and stream away from the massive body; the mysterious process called magnetic reconnection releases huge bursts of stored energy, possibly causing coronal mass ejections of fast moving plasma to approach the Earth; most of the solar wind flows around the Earth’s magnetic field, physically compressing the field on the day-side and stretching it out into a long tail on the night-side. But some gets through, and what does get through can cause power surges through electromagnetic induction, and it will follow the Earth’s magnetic field lines to the poles, where it will collide with molecules of gas in the air, exciting them and causing photon emission of several brilliant colours. All this combines to produce the Earth’s only natural light show: the aurora."
So that ought to be pretty exciting and interesting, of course I have lots of revision to do for As examsn as well and I still have to write some waves notes for this site, but I'm feeling pretty confident about this. Hopefully I can get some cool artwork as well.
