Conveners
Day 3 / Session 3
- Mitsuo Oka (UC Berkeley)
Although commonly approximated as an ideal fluid in cosmological simulations, the hot tenuous gas permeating clusters of galaxies is known to be a magnetized collisionless plasma sharing some similar physical properties with, e.g., planetary magnetospheres, the solar atmosphere and solar wind, and accretion discs around compact objects. I will discuss the current knowledge and challenges in...
Solar flares are the most powerful explosions in the solar system, impulsively releasing stored magnetic energy to heat coronal plasma to tens of MK and accelerating electrons to hundreds of MeV and ions to tens of GeV. Even within quiescent (non-flaring) active regions, ambient plasma is impulsively heated to 5-10 MK, well above the "quiet corona" temperatures of 1-3 MK. Despite many decades...
Magnetic reconnection is a fundamental universal energy conversion process which converts magnetic energy into particle energy including heating and non-thermal acceleration. In the low Beta plasma of the Earth’s magnetotail magnetic energy is released quasi-regularly by the reconnection process, leading to explosive energy release similar to the energy build-up and release process in solar...
