Maggie is a recipient of a WSGC Graduate and Professional Research Fellowship and works with Professor Melinda Soares-Furtado on young variables (including brown dwarfs and free-floating planets!) in the Orion Nebula Cluster. She uses near-infrared time series observations from the James Webb Space Telescope. In the future, her project will also explore disk evolution using millimeter-wavelength data in collaboration with Abygail Waggoner, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Astronomy. Alongside her research, Maggie engages the public as an Outreach Fellow and a docent at UW–Madison’s physics museum.
Congratulations, Maggie!
WIPAC hosts the 2026 summer meeting of the CTAO-US/SCT Collaboration
Between July 13 and 15, the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC) hosted members of the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO)-US/Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope (SCT) Collaboration for its 2026 summer meeting. The SCT, a medium-sized telescope for CTAO, will be able to detect gamma rays from cosmic sources such as pulsars and supermassive black holes in order [...]
WIPAC study provides a clue about a feature in the spectrum of cosmic neutrinos
At the South Pole, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, embedded in a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, searches for weakly interacting particles called neutrinos that are able to travel undisturbed through the cosmos. Earlier this year, scientists at the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC) reported, for the first time, an interesting feature or “break” in [...]
Unraveling the Mystery of Energetic Particles: How Turbulence Shapes the Universe
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The prevalence of non-thermal, highly energetic particles is one of the most striking features of the universe. Such particles are responsible for some of the most spectacular events in space physics and astrophysics. For instance, these particles are the engines behind the most luminous events in the universe, including Gamma-Ray Bursts and Blazars. They are components of solar flares and coronal mass ejections – outflows of energetic plasma that can damage satellites and disrupt power grids. In laboratory fusion devices, high-energy “runaway electrons” and alpha particles behave like non-thermal populations. Controlling them is vital for achieving fusion energy.
Understanding these particles is a frontier problem in plasma physics and astrophysics. For many decades, scientists have been trying to understand what causes these particles to have so much energy and why they defy the “Maxwell-Boltzmann equilibrium”.
In a recent publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers at UW Madison and Los Alamos National Laboratory proposed yet another view on this age-old problem. They analyzed the fact that non-thermal particles often appear in turbulent environments, that is, in systems where the flow of hot ionized gas – plasma – is random. Turbulence, on the other hand, whether it appears in the interstellar medium, Earth’s atmosphere, or a stirred cup of coffee is a rather universal phenomenon. It generates fluid fluctuations, known as “swirling eddies”, whose scales and energies have remarkably universal distributions.
Physicists have long been intrigued by universal laws, which they expect to emerge from theories that explain fundamental physical behavior. These theories can be applied to a variety of systems and environments, often extending well beyond the cases they were first developed for.
In this study, researchers investigated whether the universality observed in the energy distribution of energetic particles is related to the universality of turbulent fluctuations. They focused on the balance of energy between turbulent fluctuations and particles whose gyro-scales (the sizes of their rotational orbits in a magnetic field) are comparable to the scales of these fluctuations. “This energy balance assumption allowed us to analytically predict the particle energy distribution functions,” says Stanislav Boldyrev, one of the study’s authors, “and our predictions aligned with the results of numerical simulations. We may be one step closer to solving the mystery of non-equilibrium particles in space and astrophysical systems.”
He notes, however, that the hypothesis requires further investigation, which may involve both observational and numerical studies. “This study inspires young researchers by highlighting fundamental unsolved problems in plasma dynamics,” continues Boldyrev, “It would not have been possible without the years of hard work by our talented young scientists, which include graduate student Daniel Humphrey and postdoctoral researcher Dr. Cristian Vega, as well as the support from the Department of Energy and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.”
The figure above shows the electron density in turbulent electron-positron pair plasma.
This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Fusion Energy Sciences under award number DE-SC0024362, and by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory begins the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST)!
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The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory has begun the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST); an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of our Universe that will revolutionize the way we explore the cosmos.
University of Wisconsin–Madison physics professor Keith Bechtol has been part of the international team that built and operates Rubin Observatory since 2016, serving in multiple leadership roles. He served as System Verification and Validation Scientist responsible for orchestrating the on-sky observing campaigns and data analyses to confirm that the as-built Rubin Observatory can achieve its ambitious science goals. In October 2025, Bechtol was appointed to lead the Early Operations Optimization campaign, coordinating efforts to tune up the observatory to reliably perform at the high level needed for 10 years of sustained LSST observing.
“Starting tonight, Rubin Observatory will repeatedly scan the sky on nearly every clear night for the next decade. We aim to acquire more than 2 million individual images using the largest camera ever built and produce the greatest cosmic movie ever made,” Bechtol says. “Delivering consistently sharp image quality across the enormous field of view throughout the night, night-after-night, while rapidly scanning the sky requires many components working together with incredible precision.”
Bechtol is also Deputy Spokesperson for the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration, the international science collaboration formed to perform cosmological analyses of LSST data. “We are all looking forward to seeing what we can learn about dark matter and dark energy from LSST data. The discovery potential is enormous and there could be surprises.”
UW–Madison PhD students Miranda Gorsuch, Julian Beas-Gonzalez, and Kayleigh Excell have also been contributing to the scientific validation of early data from Rubin Observatory.
For more information, read the official release here.
Adam Distler, Physics and Astronomy alumni wins the prestigious Hertz Fellowship!
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Adam Distler, a 2024 UW–Madison graduate, has been named one of the 2026 Hertz Fellows.
As the Hertz Foundation describes it: “The Hertz Fellowship provides financial and lifelong professional support for the nation’s most promising doctoral students in the applied sciences, engineering and mathematics. Awarded through a rigorous selection process honed over seven decades, Hertz Fellows receive up to five years of funding and join an influential community dedicated to solving our most pressing challenges.”
Originally from Minnesota, Adam was a physics undergraduate at UW–Madison, where he also completed majors in Astronomy-Physics and Mathematics. He worked with Professor Melinda Soares-Furtado, co-authoring two papers before beginning his doctoral studies at Harvard, and is also completing projects with Professors Juliette Becker and Nicholas Stone.
WIPAC scientists observe a spectral change in the astrophysical neutrino flux
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, embedded in a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, searches for weakly interacting particles called neutrinos that are able to travel undisturbed through the cosmos. Of interest are high-energy astrophysical neutrinos that can arise from cosmic ray interactions with matter or photons in astrophysical sources. Thus far, the dominant sources of the [...]
Velocity gradients key to explaining large-scale magnetic field structure
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All celestial bodies — planets, suns, even entire galaxies — produce magnetic fields, affecting such cosmic processes as the solar wind, high-energy particle transport, and galaxy formation. Small-scale magnetic fields are generally turbulent and chaotic, yet large-scale fields are organized, a phenomenon that plasma astrophysicists have tried explaining for decades, unsuccessfully.
In a paper published January 21 in Nature, a team led by scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have run complex numerical simulations of plasma flows that, while leading to turbulence, also develop structured flows due to the formation of large-scale jets. From their simulations, the team has identified a new mechanism to describe the generation of magnetic fields that can be broadly applied, and has implications ranging from space weather to multimessenger astrophysics.
Bindesh Tripathi
“Magnetic fields across the cosmos are large-scale and ordered, but our understanding of how these fields are generated is that they come from some kind of turbulent motion,” says the study’s lead author Bindesh Tripathi, a former UW–Madison physics graduate student and current postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University. “Given that turbulence is known to be a destructive agent, the question remains, how does it create a constructive, large-scale field?”
Before working on three-dimensional (3D) magnetic fields, Tripathi investigated systems with hydrodynamic flows and two-dimensional (2D) magnetic fields. After staring at the movies and images of 3D magnetic turbulence, he noticed similarities in the shapes of large-scale flows and large-scale magnetic field structures. But it wasn’t as simple as applying fluid dynamic theory to magnetic field generation: the former may be solved as a 2D problem, whereas the latter must be solved in 3D, making it a much more complex, difficult-to-solve problem.
Tripathi and his colleagues decided to tackle the problem with two key changes from previous research.
The first difference was the input: a constantly replenished velocity gradient. A cyclist hitting a curb head-on, say, experiences a velocity gradient: the wheels stop, but momentum can cause the cyclist to fly over the handlebars. Velocity gradients exist throughout the universe; for example, within different layers of the sun or when two neutron stars merge. The team reasoned that this gradient is likely important to include while studying 3D magnetic fields.
Second, they ran perhaps the most complex simulation to date of magnetic fields in the presence of an unstable velocity gradient — 137 billion grid points in 3D space. Altogether, they ran around 90 simulations, generating 0.25 petabytes of data and using nearly 100 million CPU hours on the Anvil supercomputer at Purdue University.
Ordered magnetic fields spontaneously emerge out of chaotic, tangled fields. This finding is consistent with astrophysical observations. Streamlines of magnetic fields are 3D-rendered and are colored red–blue by the x-component of the field. Streamlines of the electric current density are shown in green; color represents magnitude. Poloidal fields are displayed on the (y,z)-plane, after averaging them over the azimuthal (x) direction. Credit: Tripathi et al.
“We start our simulations with a flow that has a velocity gradient, then we add some tiny perturbations, like moving one fluid particle infinitesimally, we let that perturbation propagate over the system and grow, and then analyze the data over time,” Tripathi says. “Initially, these perturbations lead to turbulent flows and magnetic fields in small-scale structures, then, over time, they emerge into larger, ordered structures.”
When Tripathi ran the same simulations where the initial velocity gradient had decayed over time, the simulation only produced the chaotic, small-scale patterns. “So that’s really the main key: to have a steady, large-scale gradient in velocity,” he emphasizes.
Adds Paul Terry, physics professor at UW–Madison and senior author of the study: “Magnetic field generation via dynamos has been extensively studied for 70 years, with the frustrating result that the generated fields almost always end up at small scales and highly disordered, unlike observations. This work, therefore, potentially resolves a long-standing issue.”
Though the theory cannot be tested in the distant universe, a lab-based experiment does support the team’s findings: in 2012, colleagues at the Wisconsin Plasma Physics Laboratory were trying to better understand the nature of the magnetic field generation process in a laboratory experiment, but their data did not fit any of the previous models. Tripathi and colleagues’ new theory of magnetic field generation more closely matches the experimental data and helps to resolve the confounding findings.
“This work has the potential to explain the magnetic dynamics relevant in, for example, neutron star mergers and black hole formation, with direct applications to multimessenger astronomy,” Tripathi says. “It may also help better understand stellar magnetic fields and predict gas ejections from the sun toward the earth.”
Top image: The magnetic fields in large-scale structures are organized despite local areas of turbulence. The magnetic field in the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51), captured by NASA’s flying Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) observatory superimposed on a Hubble telescope picture of the galaxy. The image shows infrared images of grains of dust in the M51 galaxy. Their magnetic orientation largely follows the spiral shape of the galaxy, but it is also being pulled in the direction of the neighboring galaxy at the right of the frame. (Credit: NASA, SOFIA, HAWC+, Alejandro S. Borlaff; JPL-Caltech, ESA, Hubble)
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (2409206) and U.S. Department of Energy (DE-SC0022257) through the DOE/NSF Partnership in Basic Plasma Science and Engineering. Anvil at Purdue University was used through allocation TG-PHY130027 from the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program, which is supported by National Science Foundation (2138259, 2138286, 2138307, 2137603 and 2138296).
Francis Halzen wins 2026 APS Medal for Exceptional Achievement in Research
