Centre for Plasma Astrophysics: Latest News

Nature paper on Alfvén waves - July 2011

For the very first time, powerful Alfvèn waves have been observed in the Sun’s corona. The plasma in the observed waves moves at speeds of 20 km/s and the waves themselves propagate at high speeds of 200 to 250 km/s. The discovery of these powerful Alfvèn waves is important because they may explain the high temperatures in the Sun’s corona and the high speeds of solar wind. This has been demonstrated by research conducted by Professor Marcel Goossens of the Centre for Plasma Astrophysics at K.U.Leuven. The discovery of powerful Alfvèn waves in the high atmosphere of the Sun, which is now being reported in Nature, occurred with telescopes on board the Solar Dynamics Observatory – a NASA satellite for solar observation. A link to the publication can be found here.

Simulation of massive binaries gets A&A cover picture - February 2011

The paper `Thin shell morphology in the circumstellar medium of massive binaries' by CPA members Allard Jan van Marle, Rony Keppens, and Zakaria Meliani has been selected to provide one of the cover pictures of issue 527 of Astronomy & Astrophysics. The image shows the density and thermal pressure of the gas surrounding a luminous blue variable (LBV) and an O-star in a wide orbit binary system.

Advanced magnetohydrodynamics workshop - April 2011

CPA members R. Keppens and S. Poedts, together with J.P. Goedbloed and A. Voegler, are organising a workshop on advances magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). This events will take place at the Lorentz Center, an international center that coordinates and hosts workshops in sciences at Leiden (NL). This workshop intends to join and exploit state-of-the-art expertise in MHD plasma modeling, and thereby identify the most challenging open questions common to laboratory and astrophysical applications. In a timely follow-up to the Principles of Magnetohydrodynamics Lorentz Centre workshop in march 2005, this workshop will focus on the invariably multi-disciplinary aspect of current MHD research, where advanced numerical and analytical techniques combine to pursue modern plasma physics research. The targeted subthemes include: advanced MHD spectroscopy, computational MHD challenges, and contemporary solar and astrophysical research frontiers. More information about the workshop can be found here.

New book on magnetohydrodynamics - April 2010

The new text book of Hans Goedbloed (FOM institute for Plasma Physics, Rijnhuizen, NL), Rony Keppens (CPA), and Stefaan Poedts (CPA) is now available from Cambridge University Press. The book is entitled Advanced Magnetohydrodynamics with applications to laboratory and astrophysical plasmas and it analyses the applications of plasma physics to thermonuclear fusion and plasma astrophysics from the single viewpoint of MHD. This approach turns out to be ever more powerful when applied to streaming plasmas (the vast majority of visible matter in the universe), toroidal plasmas (the most promising approach to fusion energy), and nonlinear dynamics (where it all comes together with modern computational techniques and extreme transonic and relativistic plasma flows). The textbook interweaves theory and explicit calculations of waves and instabilities of streaming plasmas in complex magnetic geometries. It is ideally suited to advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in plasma physics and astrophysics. This book:

• examines both the fundamental concepts (MHD spectral theory, numerical MHD, transonic flow) and the modern applications (tokamaks, astrophysical jets).
• presents basic theory together with numerical techniques so readers can make the transition from theory to application.
• provides a unique view on the similarities and differences of nuclear fusion (tokamak) plasmas and solar and space plasmas.

Astrophysical Journal Letter on the measurement of the electric current in a kpc long jet - November 2011

In a study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, K.U.Leuven researcher and professor of space weather Giovanni Lapenta presents surprising new data on the electrical currents emitted in the environment around supermassive black holes. Using a new measurement technique, Lapenta and his co-authors recorded one of the largest electric currents ever measured in the universe. The text of the study Measurement of the Electric Current in a kpc-Scale Jet is available on the website of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Odysseus grant for Tom Van Doorsselaere - June 2011

CPA postdoc Tom Van Doorsselaere obtained the prestigeous Odysseus funding from FWO - Vlaanderen. The Odysseus programme intends to create a "brain gain" and to attract international top scientists to Flanders. Tom Van Doorsselaere was selected for a type II award, given to promising, young researchers. The award is for 722.700 euros. More information can be found here.

Prize of the research council - May 2011

The research council of the K.U.Leuven awards every year several young postdocs for their excellent research. This year, CPA postdoc Tom Van Doorsselaere had the honour to receive this prestigious prize for his research on Dynamics of coronal loop oscillations.

Astrophysical Journal Letter on gas-dust circumstellar media - June 2011

In a letter publication in the Astrophysical Journal, Centre for Plasma Astrophysics postdoc Dr. Allard Jan van Marle predicted, by means of highly detailed numerical simulations, how the gas and dust distribution may well differ substantially for evolved stars like Betelgeuse from the Orion constellation. In a fruitful collaboration between Centre for Plasma Astrophysics (CPA) and Institute for Astronomy (IvS) K.U.Leuven colleagues, we studied by means of grid-adaptive, highly parallel numerical simulations the stellar wind-interstellar medium collision front, and predicted gas-dust misalignments depending on the dust grainsize distribution. In the future, this will be confronted with ongoing infrared observations of evolved star environments.

Alexander Soenen receives AGU student award - May 2011

During the AGU 2010 fall meeting in San Francisco, CPA PhD student Alexander Soenen received an Outstanding Student Paper Award for his work entitled The 25 July 2004 event: Observational and numerical study.

SWIFF kick-off meeting - February 2011

The first week of February 2011, the kick-off meeting of the Space Weather Integrated Forecasting Framework (SWIFF) took place at Leuven. SWIFF, a project funded by the European Comission through the Framework Programme 7, aims to develop mathematical models and computational methods especially designed to handle the multiple physics and the multiple scales characteristic of space weather phenomena. The project intends to produce an integrated forecasting framework able to model space weather events from their solar origin to the impact on Earth and its space environment, focusing on the effect on humans and technology in space and on the ground infrastructure. SWIFF is a collaboration between seven european research institutes and universities. More information about SWIFF can be found on the project webpage.

Intel, Imec and five Flemish universities open Flanders ExaScience Lab - June 2010

Intel, Imec, the Flemish Agency for Innovation by Science and Technology (IWT) and five Flemish universities announced the opening of the ExaScience Lab in Leuven, Belgium. The lab’s goal is to achieve breakthroughs in power reduction and reliability, an effort critical to extend today’s supercomputer architecture to exascale levels of performance, or speeds 1,000 times faster than today’s supercomputers, using up to 1 million cores and 1 billion processes to do so. The ExaScience Lab will be the latest member of Intel’s European research network that consists of 21 labs employing more than 900 R&D professionals. Breakthroughs in exascale computing could mean the ability to simulate very complex systems, impossible to replicate today like the human body or Earth’s climate. The result, if the computing industry is successful, could mean finding cures for diseases or better predicting natural disasters. The Flanders ExaScience Lab will be focused at enabling scientific applications, beginning with the simulation and prediction of space weather, or electromagnetic activity in the space surrounding Earth’s atmosphere. The Flanders ExaScience Lab brings together all Flemish universities - University of Antwerp, Ghent University, Hasselt University, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and Vrije Universiteit Brussel - along with Imec (a world-leading semiconductor company) in a unique research collaboration. The Flanders ExaScience Lab kicks off with close to two dozen researchers and will add another dozen or so by 2012. The lab will be hosted at Imec and is supported by the Flemish Government agency for innovation by science and technology (IWT).