Lindsay Glesener
University of Minnesota, MN·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Solar flares are sudden explosions on the Sun that accelerate electrons to very high energies. They help drive space weather, which affects the environment around Earth.
- Fields
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Physics
Engineering
- Topics
solar flares
hard X-rays
HXR spectroscopy
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2027
What they work on
- Measure how quickly solar flares accelerate electrons by detecting short (under 2-second) spikes in hard X-ray time profiles with the IMPRESS CubeSat spectrometer.
- Investigate whether flare electrons travel in beams, using stereoscopic hard X-ray directivity measurements that compare views of the same flare from different spacecraft.
- Work with new space-based instruments to assess the full distribution of flare-accelerated electrons, from thermal to non-thermal energies.
- Develop and demonstrate a high-energy radiation detector that measures a vast range of flare brightnesses without pileup or saturation.
More about the research
How flares accelerate particles so quickly, and in which directions, is still an open problem. Hard X-rays, the most energetic X-rays produced by flares, are a direct signal of these fast-moving electrons.
Why it matters
Solar activity is the ultimate source of space weather, which affects the near-Earth and geospace environment. Better measurements of how flares accelerate electrons could improve understanding of the processes behind space weather. The detector developed for IMPRESS may also be useful for observing other intense bursts, such as electron microbursts and astrophysical bursts, without saturating.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Xinlin Li
University of Colorado Boulder, CO·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Analyze more than 12 solar energetic particle events seen by the REPTile-2 CubeSat detector, combined with NOAA/POES, MetOp and ground riometer data, to measure how storms shift the latitudes where particles reach the polar atmosphere.
Colby Haggerty
University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI·Physics·Early-career
Determine how a velocity shear between neighboring plasma flows changes the rate, outflow speed and heating of collisionless magnetic reconnection, using kinetic modeling and theory.
Shasha Zou
University of Michigan, MI·Physics
Track how the global ionospheric total electron content (TEC) changes over time during solar flares, using TEC data from worldwide GNSS satellite-navigation receivers paired with solar radiation from the FISM2 model or SDO EVE observations.
The school
University of Minnesota: 88 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 722 research doctorates a year.
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