Press Release

NAS RA V. Ambartsumian Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory (BAO)
Press release 28.08.2023

SEMINAR BY KIRILL KUZANYAN

On August 28, the BAO hosted a seminar by Kirill Kuzanyan, from IZMIRAN, Russia. His speech was devoted to “Observational proxies of magnetic helicity in the Sun, its origin, transport, and role in the solar dynamo models”.

The researcher introduced the importance of magnetic helicity in magnetohydrodynamics as an inviscid invariant. As it is also mentioned in the abstract of the talk, in the context of solar physics, it is extremely important in several aspects. Firstly, its relaxation time is much longer than the turnover time of solar turbulence, and therefore, observations of magnetic structures such as active regions may bring essential information on its global distribution. Secondly, the local distribution and dynamics of its observational proxies is linked with the potential for solar flaring activity. And more, the transport of magnetic helicity which is generated by the solar dynamo mechanism and released to the heliosphere (where it is taken out by the solar wind) provides an important constraint on the dynamo models. The balance of helicity plays a role of a nonlinear feedback which determines complexity of dynamic behaviour of solar activity. We show that important observable properties of solar cyclicity can be obtained even with simple self-consistent models of solar dynamo with helicity.

Meline Asryan