Title and abstract.txt

45 minutes
Audience mostly physics undergraduates.

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Magnetism in the Coolest, Smallest Stars

The outermost layers of our Sun are filled with not only a roiling, hot
plasma, but also a tangled magnetic field that’s strong enough to
significantly affect the plasma’s dynamics, leading to “space weather”
phenomena like flares, coronal mass ejections, and the solar wind. The Earth
is itself surrounded by a magnetic field, one that helps to shield us from the
potentially harmful effects of space weather — it has been argued that life
couldn’t exist on Earth without its protection. Although both the solar and
terrestrial magnetic fields have been studied extensively, observations of
other stars continue to expose gaps in our understanding. I’ll discuss the
magnetism of the very smallest stars, which show several surprising effects —
most notably the fact that they generate strong magnetic fields at all,
counter to initial expectations. By studying these objects, we hope to not
only better understand them, the Sun, and the Earth, but also to start to
predict the magnetic behavior of planets around other stars, and thus whether
they too might be habitable.