The first WVUniverse talk for the new year will be an 'explosive' one.
Giulia Murtas, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa where her research interests are focused on the quantitative analysis and numerical modeling of explosive events on solar and space plasmas related to magnetic reconnection, such as chromospheric jets, spicules and Ellerman bombs, and the acceleration of energetic particles across the heliosphere which largely affect space weather conditions.
Who doesn't like the Northern Lights? The sources of such fascinating phenomena - and of a lot of potential damages to human technologies, including frying satellites and power grids - are the even more fascinating eruptions taking place all over the atmosphere of the Sun and across the interplanetary space. All these explosive events - solar flares, coronal mass ejections, spicules, erupting filaments - have one thing in common: magnetic field lines snap like uncooked spaghetti, releasing huge amounts of energy in a process called magnetic reconnection. In this WVUniverse talk, we will figure out together how to understand magnetic reconnection, and how to model, predict and forecast the most dramatic eruptions of the Sun.
Murtas is also leading observational campaigns dedicated to exploring the origin of energetic events on the Sun at radio frequencies, through the SunDish/Solaris collaboration.
WVUniverse talks are general audience, outreach talks that explore different fields of astronomy like cosmology, instrumentation, astrobiology, planetary science and more. Each talk is designed for all ages.
After each talk, a fun Kahoot quiz is offered and the lucky winner walks away with a prize.
WVUniverse presents: