Dr. Haihong Che, a solar physicist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) has been awarded a five-year, $616,000 National Science Foundation CAREER award to study how solar flares explosively release magnetic energy and create energetic particles.
The Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) offers the most prestigious NSF awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education.
Dr. Che, an assistant professor in the Department of Space Science at UAH will be doing her research at the university’s Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research (CSPAR).
Super-hot charged particles, which are for the most part held at bay by the sun’s turbulent and unstable corona, often escape into space in the form of solar flares, where according to Dr. Che, they propagate into space at a speed close to the speed of light.
“A decent-sized fraction of these energetic particles travel to Earth,” she explained. “The sudden increase of cosmic ray intensity can endanger life and affect human activities in space, such as astronauts in the international space station and spacecraft.
“That’s why the study of solar flares and energetic particles is important to us.”
Under the new grant, a novel electron acceleration mechanism Dr. Che has been working on will be extended to ions, and researchers will build a solid physical foundation for the new mechanism.
Dr. Che’s team includes Dr. Bofeng Tang, a CSPAR postdoctoral researcher; and Space Science graduate students Chris Crawford, Atit Deuja and Rubaiya Shikha.
Their research will rely on big data super-computation using NASA’s High-End Computing Program at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division at Ames Research Center in California. It will also utilize data from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe to test the model.
“During solar flares, energetic particles can produce multi-band emissions in the corona, and we can obtain the particle energy distribution and information about the magnetic field through the observation of the emissions,” Che said. “With this information, we can test our model and investigate the dynamic process of solar flares to further advance our understanding of solar activities.”
The processes are essential for the sun to generate heat, so modeling them is fundamental to informing the evolving field of solar weather prediction.
“Also, since the sun is a natural controlled fusion process,” Che continued, “understanding how the sun confines the plasma and releases the energy can inform research into human-made plasma fusion reactors to produce clean energy.”
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