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Contact
Email: maloneys@tcd.ie
Tel: +353 (0)1 896 2157
Fax: +353 (0)1 671 1759
Bio
I joined the Astrophysics Research Group in September 2007, having spent six weeks traveling around South America after graduating from UCD with a B.Sc in Experimental Physics. After spending a summer at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, I decided to keep going with physics and follow up on my degree with PhD in astrophysics. Originally I'm from Co. Kildare but have lived in Dublin on and off since starting college. Currently I live on the south side of the city in D4 if you will, with four of my friends from at home, couldn't ask for better craick.
Research
I study massive explosions on the Sun that can expel up 1,000,000,000 tonnes of material off the Sun, this material can speed towards Earth at more than 2500 kilometers per second, and have significant effects if it interacts with the earth. Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) as they are known expel plasma and magnetic fields which can cause serious problems for communication and power grids here on Earth as well as interfere with radio and satellite communication as well as the satellites themselves. An imaging suite aboard the twin STEREO spacecraft called SECCHI allows the tracking of CMEs from just above the solar surface all the way to Earth. This allows a unique opportunity to study CME kinematics and morphology from the Sun-Earth line. With a better understanding of the forces that govern CMEs as they propagate from the sun to the Earth, we may be better able to forecast arrival time here at Earth and beyond. The reason that this is a new opportunity is that CMEs are very faint on their own and when compared to the Sun are extremely faint, but a new instrument in SECCHI called the Heliospheric Imager (HI) allows direct imaging of CME from roughly 20 solar radii to Earth. Using all the SECCHI instruments we can image CMEs from the solar surface to 1 AU, gaining insight into the initiation, acceleration and propagation mechanisms of CMEs.
