On 20 June, 2022 Dana-Camelia Talpeanu successfully defended her PhD thesis ‘Numerical and Observational Study of Stealth and Consecutive Coronal Mass Ejections’. Her work was a joint project between the Royal Observatory of Belgium and the KU Leuven.
Her study combines observational and numerical methods to investigate stealth and consecutive CMEs. She worked to determine the processes that trigger them, their geomagnetic effects and how they differ from more typical solar eruptions, in order to improve the forecasts of their geoeffectiveness. Stealth CMEs are very difficult to predict as they don’t leave clear coronal signatures that indicate the source region.
Another important research avenue was the interaction of the CMEs with different background solar winds and with other CMEs that may affect their propagation in interplanetary space and towards Earth. Dr. Talpeanu studied these aspects numerically and by analyzing the forces that contribute to the CME dynamics, which had not been done so extensively for this type of simulations before.
