Jeudi 7 novembre 2019 à 14h00 (Salle de conférence du bâtiment 17)
Kyle Auguston (AIM-CEA)
Massive stars as with all stars possess convective regions, from the PMS to their explosive demise. These regions likely participate in vigorous dynamo action, leading to the construction of magnetic fields that can be in superequipartition with respect to the convection when in a rapidly rotating regime. Moreover, near surface regions of sufficiently massive stars can be convectively unstable, producing the so-called iron-bump convection zone. This region too will likely be running a dynamo. However, if it is threaded with fossil fields extant in the radiative regions of these stars which are of sufficient strength, it may be possible to quench the convection or shift it to very small scales, leading to weaker excitation of magneto-gravito-inertial waves in the radiative photospheric regions of these stars that manifest as macroturbulence. Yet establishing such strong fossil fields remains a largely murky process, where the complexities of the early evolutionary history of the star comes into play. Thus, this talk aims to cover the evolutionary history of massive stars in terms of their convective dynamos, their fossil field development, and the observational implications of such fields.
Jeudi 24 octobre 2019 à 14h00 (Salle de conférence du bâtiment 17)
Arlette Noels, Professeure de l’Université de Liège
Arlette Noels nous avait fait une première partie de ce cours l’année dernière, concernant principalement les stades précoces et la séquence principale. Cette année, nous nous concentrerons sur les stades postérieurs à la séquence principale, les stades évolués. Pour cette occasion, nous ne regarderons pas nos montres, la durée de ce séminaire sera laissée libre.
Lundi 14 octobre 2019 à 16h00 (Salle de conférence du bâtiment 17)
Anne-Lise Maire, Université de Liège (Belgique)
The New Earths in the Alpha Cen Region campaign is a 100-h observing program to image massive rocky planets in the habitable zone of the two stars of Alpha Cen, our nearest neighboring stars. This program is a collaboration between the Breakthrough Initiatives and ESO and was launched in 2016. To achieve the challenging goal of NEAR, the VLT MIR instrument VISIR was removed from UT3 for upgrades and installed at UT4 in order to couple it the Adaptive Optics Facility. The University of Liege provided an optimized vortex coronagraph for NEAR. After a successful commissioning in April and May 2019, the NEAR campaign was completed in May-June 2019. The campaign generated >6 TB of data, which are available to the community in the ESO archive. The data are currently under analysis by the NEAR collaboration. I will present the context of the project, my work on assessing the performance of the NEAR vortex coronagraph and on the data analysis, and the prospects for imaging Earth-mass planets around Alpha Cen from the ground in the near future.
Lundi 7 octobre 2019 à 14h00 (Salle de réunion du bâtiment 16)
Xiaowei Liu (South-Western Institute for Astronomy Research, Yunnan University, China)
I will present the scientific motivations, technical design and survey plans of the 1.6m Multi-channel Photometric Survey Telescope (Mephisto) currently under development at South-Western Institute for Astronomy Research (SWIFAR) and expected to be operational in 2021. Mephisto has a 1.6 m primary and is equipped with three CCD cameras of a field-of-view 3.14 deg2, capable of simultaneously imaging the same patch of sky in three bands (ugi or vrz). The three cameras boast a total of 1.4 Giga pixels. Mephisto will yield real-time colours of astronomical objects with unprecedented accuracies, and deliver for the first time a coloured documentary of our evolving universe. The unique capability of recording high-precision real-time colours, thus allowing quick and robust classification of fast transients, makes Mephisto particularly powerful in time domain astrophysics. The Mephisto surveys will have two components : the Mephisto-W covering the whole northern sky of ～26,000 deg2 and the Mephisto-D, Mephisto-H and Mephisto-M covering sky areas of respectively thousands, hundreds and tens of square degrees with a corresponding cadence of days, hours and minutes, targeting specifically fast variables and transients. Astrophysics problems that Mephisto will help tackle range from Solar System objects, stars and exoplanetary systems, stars and the Milky Way, to galaxies and cosmology.
Mardi 1er octobre 2019 à 11h00 (Salle de conférence du Château (bât. 9))
Linghua Wang (Peking University)
Solar wind surpathermal particles carry important information on the common particle acceleration/transport processes at the Sun and in the IPM. We present a statistical survey of solar wind suprathermal electrons measured at 0.1-200 keV by the WIND 3DP instrument at 1 AU during quiet times in solar cycles 23 and 24. All the strahl, halo and superhalo electron populations show no obvious correlation with the solar wind core population. The halo electron population has an isotropic angular distribution, while the strahl population, predominantly observed in fast solar wind, is antisunward beaming along the interplanetary magnetic field. The observed energy spectrum of both strahl and halo electrons at 0.1-1.5 keV generally fits to a Kappa distribution function, with an index κ and effective temperature Teff. We find a strong positive correlation between κ and Teff for both strahl and halo electrons and a strong positive correlation between the strahl density and halo density, likely reflecting the nature of the generation of these electron populations. In addition, the strahl electron number density appears to positively correlate with both the solar wind electron temperature and the IMF magnitude, in both slow and fast solar wind. For the superhalo electron population at quiet times, the observed pitch-angle distribution is generally isotropic, and the observed omnidirectional differential flux generally fits to a power-law function, J E-β. The spectral index β ranges from 1.6 to 3.7, with a broad maximum between 2.4 and 2.8 (2.0 and 2.4) in solar cycle 23 (24). Both β and nsup show no obvious correlation with the sunspot number, solar flares, CMEs, strahl/halo parameters, etc. In the end, we will talk about the in situ electron acceleration of solar wind suprathermal electrons at ICME-driven shocks observed at 1 AU.
Séminaire donné dans le cadre du consortium meeting de Solar Orbiter/RPW.
