03/27/2023
By Joanne Gagnon-Ketchen

Physics colloquium, Wednesday March 29 at 4 p.m. in Olsen 102.

Chuanfei Dong, Boston University will give a talk on "Exploring Heliophysics in Our Solar System and Beyond: From Stellar Coronae to (Exo)Planetary Atmospheres."

Abstract:
The exciting and rapidly growing frontier of heliophysics encompasses a wide spectrum of fields ranging from solar/stellar physics to space and planetary science. The turbulent solar corona constitutes a natural starting point - I will delineate the world’s largest magnetohydrodynamic simulation performed to explore the interplay between magnetic reconnection and magnetohydrodynamic turbulence and the former's striking ramifications for the turbulent energy cascade. I will then discuss how the solar wind and extreme space weather events interact with planets in our solar system by comparing magnetized Mercury and weakly magnetized Mars to highlight the unique aspects of each planet as well as some underlying universal features. In light of the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of heliophysics, I will also present how heliophysics has profound consequences for other fields, such as exoplanetary habitability.

BIO:
Chuanfei Dong is an Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Boston University. Prior to that, he was a DOE Staff Scientist at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and an Affiliated Research Scholar at Princeton University. He received his B.S. from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2009 and M.S. from Georgia Tech in 2010. He obtained his M.S. and Ph.D. in Space and Planetary Sciences (2012, 2015), M.S.E. in Nuclear Engineering (2014), and dual Ph.D. in Scientific Computing (2015) from the University of Michigan. During the course of his career, he was awarded the Vela Fellowship from Los Alamos National Laboratory (2013), NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship (2013), Richard and Eleanor Towner Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement (2015), and NASA Jack Eddy Postdoctoral Fellowship. He also received two NASA Group Achievement Awards (2016, 2018), one NASA Exceptional Achievement Award (2016), and the ESA (European Space Agency) Young Researcher Award (2018). In 2019, he was selected as one of the National Academy of Science’s New Leaders in Space Science.