Montana State solar physicist receives National Science Foundation CAREER award

Montana State University physics professor Rachael Filwett is pictured with a solar image Wednesday, Dec. 6, 2023, in Bozeman, Montana. MSU photo by Kelly Gorham

BOZEMAN – A Montana State University physicist who studies space weather and solar winds has received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation to further her research and establish a hands-on educational program for high school students and teachers across the state.

“The NSF has been a huge supporter of my career,” said Rachael Filwett, the newest member of MSU’s Solar Physics Group, who was hired as an assistant professor in the Department of Physics in January. That position, which she accepted upon completing her NSF-funded postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Iowa, receives funding from an NSF Faculty Development in Space Sciences grant.

But it’s the CAREER Award, designed to support early career development of teacher-researchers, that is considered to be the NSF’s most prestigious. Yves Idzerda, dean of MSU’s College of Letters and Science, said the award recognizes the expertise Filwett brings to the Solar Physics Group, which he called “one of the best space science groups in the country.”

“A number of our graduates are in leadership positions at NASA, which means we have a really strong set of influencers in policy aspects of space sciences,” Idzerda said. “Rachael has won a CAREER award, which is a trajectory you’d expect to see for somebody who’s setting policy for funding agencies.”

With the nearly $700,000, five-year grant, Filwett, a postdoctoral research scholar and two students – one graduate and one undergraduate – will embark on a study designed to further understanding of “space weather” in areas of the heliosphere known as “stream interaction regions.”

Space weather is caused by interactions of the space environment with streams of electrically charged particles, called plasma, released by the sun. Those streams — which some people may know as the “solar winds” — travel at different speeds along the sun’s magnetic field lines and collide in stream interaction regions, or SIRs. There they may experience forces that compress them together and can create shock waves. The shock waves, in turn, can cause the plasma particles to accelerate, thereby strengthening their potentially disruptive geomagnetic effects on objects they encounter further from the sun.

For example, when solar particles collide with Earth’s atmosphere, the energy often manifests as glowing auroras around the poles, commonly called the Northern Lights in this hemisphere. But more intense collisions also can cause geomagnetic disruptions that could result in massive, and potentially devastating, communication and electrical power disruptions. As part of the grant, Filwett will create two outreach projects designed to raise awareness of those realities.

“I want to make more people aware of heliophysics and that space weather is a thing they should care about,” she said.

Filwett studies all those phenomena both in the interplanetary medium — the space between the planets — and in planets’ magnetic fields. The acceleration of particles in SIRs was the focus of her doctoral dissertation, and her research under the CAREER grant will expand on it. As part of the project, Filwett and her students will compare records of solar activity against particle data collected during NASA solar and planetary missions.

She also will develop the curriculum for a new MSU course for non-science majors called “The Sun and Society,” which will cover the fundamental science about space weather and the sun’s workings and examine ways the sun has been viewed by humans through the ages. Filwett said that among other topics, the course could cover the beliefs of early civilizations and local Indigenous cultures about the sun; space weather’s role as humans travel more often in space; and the links between the solar cycle and crop production and prices.

The second project is the establishment of a statewide Space Weather Underground program in Montana high schools. Patterned after similar programs at the University of New Hampshire and University of Alaska Fairbanks, the program will offer free training to high school educators interested in teaching their students about sun and space weather.

Space Weather Underground will provide magnetometer kits to participating Montana schools, whose students will build the instruments and use them to measure magnetic fields on the ground and learn to analyze the resulting data. Filwett added that the information collected will benefit scientists at MSU because there currently isn’t a lot of that sort of data available in Montana.

“We’re looking to reach a wide range of schools over a wide geographic range. This will be a way to get good data,” she said.

John Neumeier, head of MSU’s Department of Physics, said the outreach program will be “a fabulous way to engage high school teachers and their students in a meaningful way.”

Idzerda predicted that Filwett’s expertise and enthusiasm will attract more students of all ages to the field of space sciences, including members of underrepresented groups.

“She has a passion for the field,” Idzerda said. “Students feed off that when they see that in a faculty member, so that’s exciting to see.”