Twists and turns of life, magnetic fields and gravitational waves

The New Year’s webinar will be about the origins of life on Earth and elsewhere in space. About the property of life on Earth called chirality and how it manifests itself in the magnetic field of the Sun and gravitational waves. Professor Axel Brandenburg from the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (NORDITA) in Stockholm will introduce us to this topic.

The webinar will take place on January 3, 2022 at 4PM at https://zoom.us/j/7312925489

About the lecture:

The biomolecules of our carbon-based life are mirror-symmetrical and have a specific chirality. According to the prevailing theory, this was due to a random decision during the onset period of life on Earth, and the microbial life that may have originated on Mars can have the opposite character. The concept of chirality occupies a large part of the research of prof. Brandenburg, and therefore he will be talking about the clockwise and counterclockwise curvatures of magnetic fields from the Sun. Twisted magnetic fields can also arise from the Big Bang and could create relict gravitational waves, the circular polarization of which should be one day detectable by space interferometers.

About the lecturer:

Axel Brandenburg studied physics at the University of Hamburg, and received his PhD. in 1990 at the University of Helsinki. He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at NORDITA (Denmark) and Boulder (USA). Later in 1994 he became an assistant professor at NORDITA, in 1996 a full professor at Newcastle upon Tyne (United Kingdom) and then in 2000 a full professor again at NORDITA. In 2006 he moved to NORDITA in Stockholm. In 2015-2018 he was a visiting professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder.