Physics and Astronomy

"A fast-moving coronal mass ejection that billowed away from the Sun on Nov. 4th swept past our planet at 8:50 p.m. EST on Nov 5th. The impact triggered a severe geomagnetic storm and widespread auroras (northern lights) reaching as far south as Florida, Texas, and California in the United States. Stay tuned to SpaceWeather.com for details and updates."

Space weather has made big headlines in the news recently. The Valley News had a color photo of the aurora on the front page of last Wednesday's paper, and the Rutland Daily Herald had a large article on the havoc the sightings caused people all over the country who didn't know what that light in the sky was all about. Space weather and the storms that occur can have drastic affects on all of us. On March 13th, 1989 a huge magnetic storm - the second largest storm experienced in the past 50 years- totally shut down Hydro-Quebec, the power grid servicing Canada's Quebec province. The geomagnetic storm tripped five electrical transmission lines from James Bay causing enormous power generation loss. Line restoration was complete by noon, but thousands of customers were still without power, as the system was trying to cope with the extra demand of Monday morning at the office, and customers trying to recover from over nine hours of heat loss to their homes. At the same time, beautiful auroras (northern lights) were visible as far south as southern France, all caused by the same storm.

For those of us living on Earth, space weather is essentially the interactions between the Sun and the Earth. The sun may seem really far away, but what's happening on the sun's surface, and the 'stuff' that the sun emits, hits the Earth (and all the other planets) and can directly impact our Earth environment. Ninety-five percent of the sun's energy reaches us in the form of light and heat, while the remaining 5% accounts for space weather phenomena. Auroras are beautiful displays of the Earth's magnetic field being bombarded with particles from the solar wind on an average day in space weather. The Hydro-Quebec scenario was one of those stormy days, where essentially one of the Sun's 'burps' hit the Earth's magnetic field and created geomagnetic induced currents, or GICs, that destroyed the transformer.

The apparent void between Sun and Earth is actually a maelstrom of wind and storm, with interludes of calm, always bathed in the harsh glow of ultraviolet and x-ray light. So strong is the outpouring solar wind that Earth's magnetic envelope is distorted, quivering even as it protects the fragile life on our planet.

What's a magnetic field? A magnetic field itself is the result of moving electric charges that travel along field lines from pole to pole. Remember playing with magnets? A compass points to the magnetic north pole. The Earth's magnetic field travels from South Pole to North Pole. It acts as a shield, protecting the Earth from dangerous electrically charged particles that can't penetrate the field, but are forced to move past it and around Earth, off into space.

These aurora bands over Quartz Lake State Park, Alaska was taken on 6 September, 1996 by Jan Curtis. http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/Curtis/curtis.html

How do you study and predict space weather? Is it happening on campus? "Space weather is in its infancy," Simon Shepherd, a Visiting Research Professor in the Thayer School of Engineering, told me. "Space weather is at the same point meteorology was maybe twenty years ago, trying to come up with models that will enable us to predict patterns." Simon is just one of about a dozen people on campus in Physics and in Engineering that are studying various aspects of space weather. Simon is a member of a research project called Super Dual Aurora Radar Network (SuperDARN), which is a series of radar

stations scattered across the polar regions of the Earth. These stations measure the circulation of charged particles in the ionosphere much in the same manner that weather forecasters use Doppler radar to forecast weather. "They are big HAM radios," says Simon.

"This kind of project is the ultimate combination of physics and engineering," says Simon. Physics provides the scientific backdrop, while it takes significant engineering to design and implement the physical equipment necessary to carry out the research. These radar towers are 60 feet tall. Then there are the electronics that operate the equipment and collect the data; there are the harsh 'living conditions' of these instruments that are placed in the dark, cold polar regions, where winds are off the charts and ice is a major source of damage. And then there's the data analysis, and ultimately, the computer modeling that follows.

Simon is offering '05's or '04's the opportunity to work on the SuperDARN research project as a WISP intern. The project will give students a chance to ask questions and direct where their research might be headed based on their own interests. There is so much to learn about space weather! Come to the WISP office for more information.