Jun. 9 Prof. Laurent Lamy: Auroral Radio Emissions as a Tool to Probe Planetary Magnetospheres of the Solar System and Beyond
Speaker: Laurent Lamy
LESIA/Obs. Paris, LAM/Aix-Marseille Univ.
June 9, 2022
3pm GMT+8
Magnetized planets of the solar system are powerful auroral radiosources observed between a few kHz and 40 MHz. Over the past decades, they have been widely investigated in situ by exploration probes and remotely by ground-based radiotelescopes (for Jupiter only). These radio waves are driven by a resonant cyclotron instability in magnetized/depleted plasma regions fed in by energetic electrons. They can be tracked remotely over long intervals, thus providing a rich proxy of planetary magnetospheres, probing acceleration/dissipation processes and magnetospheric dynamics (induced by the solar wind, the planetary rotation, planet/satellite interactions etc.). In this seminar, I will review our current knowledge of auroral planetary radio emissions of the solar system with lessons learnt from ground-based observations (such as those of the Nancay Decameter Array) and polar in situ exploration of radiosources by space probes (by Viking/FAST, Cassini or Juno). Comparative planetology is essential to assess universal and specific properties of those radio sources, in the frame of the ongoing search of exoplanets and more massive objects by ground-based radiotelescopes such as LOFAR, NenuFAR, NRT and soon SKA.
About the Speaker
Laurent Lamy defended his PhD thesis in 2008 at the Observatory of Paris on the study of Saturn’s magnetosphere, using remote auroral radio and ultraviolet observations together with modeling. After a postdoc at Imperial College London, he was appointed as an assistant-astronomer at the Observatory of Paris in 2012. There, he expanded his work to the comparative study of planetary magnetospheres with in situ and remote observations provided by a variety of spacecraft, such as Cassini and Juno, and Earth-based telescopes. He has been in particuler the PI of several HST ultraviolet observations of Saturn and Uranus and is the scientific responsible for the Nancay Decametric Array in Nancay which daily observes Jupiter at radio wavelengths and the co-PI of the NenuFAR Jupiter key project. Late 2020, he moved to the Astrophysics Laboratory in Marseille where he prepares the future exploration of the magnetosphere of Uranus and the search for exoplanets at radio wavelengths with giant radiotelescopes such as the Square Kilometer Array.
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