Scientific Colloquium
January 22, 2010
ANATOLY
SPITKOVSKY
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
"Extreme
Magnetospheres: From Neutron Stars to Accretion Disks"
Many astrophysical objects,
including neutron stars and accretion disks, are powered by a
combination of very strong magnetic fields and rotation. The
fields are so strong that magnetospheres of these objects can create
electron-positron pairs, accelerate particles and result in broad range
of radio to gamma-ray emission observed with high-energy missions and
telescopes. Our ability to understand these extreme environments
has been hampered by the difficulty of solving the self-consistent
behavior of strongly magnetized relativistic plasmas. I will describe
recent progress in numerical modeling of magnetically-dominated plasmas
and show applications to several sources of interest. I will present
the numerical solution of the structure of pulsar magnetospheres, which
has been a challenging problem for close to 40 years. The
knowledge of the magnetospheric shape together with the new
observations of gamma-ray emission from pulsars with Fermi Telescope
allow to directly constrain the location and physics of the
acceleration regions in the magnetosphere. I will also discuss
applications to magnetospheres of flaring magnetars and coronae of
accretion disks, and conclude with comparison to observations and
future directions.