ABSTRACT

Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) were discovered only in 1971, but there were indications of such mass ejections starting from the late 1800s. Only in the 1990s it was realized that CMEs are the primary source of severe space weather that affects our technology in space and on ground. Before the 1990s, all space weather effects such as geomagnetic storms and solar particle radiation were attributed to solar flares, probably because of the fact that they were discovered more than a century before the discovery of CMEs. Building on the progress made by Skylab, P78-1, and SMM missions, the SOHO mission provided unprecedented view of CMEs and their solar origin, furthering our understanding of CMEs. Then came the two views provided by the STEREO mission with SOHO serving as the third eye. Simultaneous availability of radio observations from the Wind spacecraft added another dimension to the CME phenomenon: the interplanetary shocks that accelerated particles and produced sudden commencement when they impacted the magnetosphere. This talk will summarize the key milestones in the study of CMEs and how they became a household name. The talk will also highlight several outstanding problems in understanding their initiation at the Sun and forecasting their arrival at a given destination in the heliosphere.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Nat Gopalswamy is an Astrophysicist at the Solar Physics Laboratory in the Heliophysics Division of NASA/GSFC. He obtained his PhD in Plasma Physics from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and post-doctoral training at the University of Maryland, College Park. He first came to Goddard as a National Research Council senior fellow in 1998 and became a civil servant in 2002. As a team member of the SOHO and STEREO missions, he studies the origin, interplanetary evolution, and Earth impact of coronal mass ejections (CMEs). He also has interest in solar radio astronomy and is affiliated with the Wind team in studying radio bursts associated with CMEs. He actively trains young scientists and graduate students in his laboratory. Dr. Gopalswamy has authored or co-authored more than 450 research articles that are frequently cited in the literature. Dr. Gopalswamy is one of the top 10 frequently published authors at Goddard.

Dr. Gopalswamy is the director of the CDAW Data Center, which hosts the popular SOHO/LASCO CME catalog used by scientists all over the world. He is currently the Executive Director of the International Space Weather Initiative (ISWI), which is a follow-on activity of the International Heliophysical Year (IHY). He is also serving as the President of the Scientific Committee on Solar Terrestrial Physics (SCOSTEP), which is an interdisciplinary body of the International Council for Science (ICSU). Both ISWI and SCOSTEP are international organizations involved in complementary aspects of science, capacity building, and outreach activities in the field of Sun-Earth connection. He has chaired many of the IHY/ISWI workshops organized in collaboration with the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs since 2005. He has also directed many space science schools organized by IHY/ISWI and SCOSTEP that have trained hundreds of graduate students in the field of solar terrestrial physics.

Dr. Gopalswamy has won numerous awards and medals, the most recent one being NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal, 2013.