☀️➡️🌏 Delighted to share our recent work exploring the dynamics of stellar magnetic forcing of planetary magnetospheres, and establishing scaling laws that offer clues to the physics of (exo)planetary space weather. Star-planet interactions vary enormously across systems, and running detailed simulations for every exoplanet is not feasible given the high computing cost. So we perform a (feasible) number of 3D MHD simulations, varying stellar wind speed, stellar magnetic field and planetary magnetic field, to uncover some general principles that apply to Earth-like (exo)planets. Alfvén wings close around the planet with faster winds but open ip with stronger stellar fields; their opening angles agree reasonably well with theory. Magnetotail current-sheet length scales linearly with a dimensionless measure of wind driving relative to magnetic confinement. The magnetopause distance scales inversely with tail length. Such scalings relationships offer physics-based insight to interpret exoplanetary magnetospheric dynamics in a generalized manner, assess (exo)planetary space weather, and understand the response of Earth like exoplanets to extreme stellar forcing. Another chapter closes in Sakshi's @sakshi_g1997 PhD thesis -- who worked hard close to a year to perform these simulations under trying circumstances and limited computational resources. Link to published paper below: frontiersin.org/journals/ast…

Ashoke Sen becomes the first Indian physicist to receive the Oskar Klein medal. Jointly awarded by Stockholm University and the Nobel Committee for Physics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the medal is named after Swedish physicist Oskar Klein and is given for work in theoretical physics and cosmology. deccanherald.com/science/ben… deccanherald.com/science/ben…