Kun Zhang
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University-Daytona Beach, FL·Earth & Environmental Science
The Sun constantly blows a stream of charged particles, the solar wind, toward Earth. Where it meets Earth's magnetic field, a shock wave called the bow shock forms, much like the wave in front of a moving boat.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Physics
- Topics
space physics
space weather
solar wind
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Oct 2027
What they work on
- Measure how the reflection rate, velocity, temperatures and velocity distribution types of freshly reflected ions at Earth's bow shock depend on solar wind speed, interplanetary magnetic field, Mach number, beta and shock angle, using satellite measurements.
- Determine how reflected ion properties evolve in space and time as the ions travel upstream from the bow shock, comparing satellite data with global numerical simulations.
- Test whether existing acceleration and reflection theories, such as adiabatic and specular reflection, explain the observed foreshock ion properties, and build a predictive model of backstreaming ions for space weather forecasting.
More about the research
Some incoming particles are accelerated and bounced back at this shock. They then stream back toward the Sun along magnetic field lines, into a region called the foreshock, where they interact with the surrounding plasma (ionized gas). These "backstreaming" ions influence space weather near Earth. This makes the bow shock a natural laboratory for studying how shocks work in space.
Why it matters
Space weather can affect technology in space and on the ground. A predictive model of foreshock ions that is built into space weather prediction models could help forecasters anticipate and mitigate these hazards more accurately. The work also improves basic understanding of how shocks in space reflect, accelerate and scatter particles.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Adam Michael
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Physics
Analyze a large database of interplanetary shocks observed simultaneously by multiple spacecraft to establish how different regions of the magnetosphere, Earth's protective magnetic bubble, respond to shocks with differing properties.
Colby Haggerty
University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI·Physics·Early-career
Determine how a velocity shear between neighboring plasma flows changes the rate, outflow speed and heating of collisionless magnetic reconnection, using kinetic modeling and theory.
Grant Stephens
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Physics
Release the first combined storm-substorm empirical model of Earth's magnetospheric magnetic field, together with its machine learning data mining algorithms, as open-source software in modern programming languages.
The school
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University-Daytona Beach: 5 labs on PI Pages, $35M a year on research, 27 research doctorates a year.
More about Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University-Daytona Beach
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