Adam Michael
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Physics
The Sun constantly blows a stream of charged particles past Earth, and that stream sometimes carries abrupt jumps in speed and density called interplanetary shocks. When a shock strikes the magnetosphere, the magnetic bubble surrounding our planet, it sets off disturbances throughout near-Earth space that can disrupt satellites, endanger astronauts and stress electrical power grids.
- Fields
Physics
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
space weather
interplanetary shocks
magnetosphere
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2028
What they work on
- 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.
- Run magnetospheric simulations that vary one shock property at a time, isolating which properties or combinations determine whether the resulting electromagnetic pulse propagates radially outward, azimuthally around Earth, or both.
- Identify the wave mode and Poynting flux, the energy the wave carries, associated with the shock-driven pulse, and track how that wave mode evolves as the pulse travels inward.
- Characterize how the passage of the pulse through the dayside magnetosphere energizes, scatters and removes charged particles, combining satellite particle measurements with the simulation results.
More about the research
Earlier studies covered only a narrow slice of possible shock properties, so it remains unclear which features of a shock determine how strongly Earth responds.
Why it matters
Space weather disturbances can damage spacecraft electronics, raise radiation exposure for astronauts and disrupt power grids. Pinning down which interplanetary shock properties control the magnetosphere's reaction could eventually let forecasters judge how damaging an incoming shock will be, giving operators time to protect vulnerable systems. The findings may also apply to how other planets' magnetospheres respond to shocks.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Kun Zhang
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University-Daytona Beach, FL·Earth & Environmental Science
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.
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.
Peter Delamere
University of Alaska Fairbanks, AK·Physics
Compare how plasma is transported outward at Jupiter and Saturn and inward at Earth, focusing on the shared region where the magnetic field changes from a dipole shape to a stretched shape.
The school
Johns Hopkins University: 100 labs on PI Pages, $4.1B a year on research, 622 research doctorates a year.
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