Hi Liliana. Welcome to GeoTalk! Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? Hi, I was born in the highlands in Peru. This gave me the advantage of living more in contact with nature. Since I remember, I was fascinated about the shape of the clouds, the sounds of the wind in …[Read More]
Hi Martin. Thank you for joining me for this interview! To start, could you please tell our readers a bit about yourself and your research interests? I’m a space plasma physicist at Imperial College London, studying how the interaction between the solar wind and our magnetosphere leads to a huge amount of dynamics and waves …[Read More]
Laboratory visualisation of solar wind interaction with Earth’s magnetic field. The Van Allen radiation belt, Earth’s magnetosphere, “bow shock” and a solar coronal hole can all be seen, and are emphasized with the ‘Planeterrella experiment‘, a vacuum chamber in the shape of a bell jar with the ‘Sun’ on the left (in the form of …[Read More]
Aurora Borealis, which means Northern Lights are caused by electrically charged particles from the sun, which enter the Earth’s atmosphere and collide with gases such as oxygen and nitrogen. When the charged particles are blown towards the Earth by the solar wind, they are largely deflected by the Earth’s magnetic field. However, the Earth’s magnetic …[Read More]
Northern lights in Tromsø, displaying the collisions between electrically charged particles from the sun which penetrate the earth’s magnetic shield and strike atoms and molecules in our atmosphere. Collisions excite the atoms causing electrons to move to higher-energy orbits, further away from the nucleus. When electrons move back to lower-energy orbits, they release particles of …[Read More]
When 17th century Japanese princess Shinanomiya Tsuneko took note of an afternoon storm in her diary one humid Kyoto summer, she could not have imagined her observations would one day help resolve a longstanding scientific conundrum. Statistical analysis of her journals has revealed a link between lightning strikes and the solar wind – proving that …[Read More]
