Princeton Center for Heliophysics Seminar

At the Center for Laboratory Astrophysics at the University of Michigan, we specialize in laboratory experiments scaled to be relevant to astrophysics. How do we design laboratory experiments to answer questions about astrophysics? And what do we mean by “scaled” in terms of an experiment?

This talk will explain how we go from an astrophysical system to a laboratory experiment by focusing on one project currently underway at the University of Michigan: studying solar ejections on the Big Red Ball machine at the University of Wisconsin. These are systems of magnetized plasma that the Sun ejects frequently and when they reach Earth cause geomagnetic storms. These storms are responsible for the aurora borealis (the northern lights) but they can also damage electrical equipment and cause power outages, and there is great interest in being able to understand and predict them better.

Our Big Red Ball experiments are designed to address open questions about how these solar ejections react to external magnetic fields. Our experiments launch a compact torus of plasma (the scaled analog of the ejected coronal material) into background plasma inside the Big Red Ball (the scaled analog of the interplanetary medium, the diffuse plasma that fills the Solar System). I will discuss how the experiment was designed, how we went about “scaling” it, results of our first round of experiments, and plans for future work.

This work is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy NNSA Center of
Excellence under cooperative agreement number DE-NA0003869.