The European Research Council awards one of its prestigious "ERC Consolidator Grants" to IAC researcher Elena Khomenko

Elena Khomenko, investigadora del IAC.
Elena Khomenko, investigadora del IAC.
Advertised on

The scientific research carried out at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) have again achieved the recognition of the European Research Council (ERC).This organization has just made an ERC Consolidator Grant, in a programme to fund the development of excellent and highly innovative projects, to the IAC scientist Elena Khomenko. The project, titled “Partial Ionisation: Two-fluid Approach” (PI2FA), is aimed at the development of new methods for investigating the magnetism in the outer layers of the solar atmosphere, the chromosphere. This line of research uses a new methodology developed in the ERC Starting Grant project. The objective is understand the process that do the chromosphere has a so high temperatures. The results may open a new window of astrophysical research with important implications for our understanding of the Sun and its magnetic activity.

PI2FA will start in 2018 and will have a duration of 5 years. From the IAC, Elena Khomenko will coordinate a research team which will have the full support of the Office for the Publication of Research Results (OTRI) and of the Research Division.

Elena Khomenko obtained her doctorate in Physics at the Ukrainian Main Observatory and is now a permanent staff scientist at the IAC. She has a wide experience in solar physics, magnetohydrodynamic theory, and numerical simulation. In her work she combines numerical research with spectropolarimetric observations; in the last ten years, she has led research into the interaction of solar waves with the magnetic field, together with studies of the quiet Sun's magnetized plasma away from active regions. In her former ERC-funded project, Khomenko and her team developed a pioneering methodology and cutting-edge numerical code to study weakly ionized solar plasma. These and other highlights have served to make Khomenko one of the few scientists in Spain to obtain an ERC Consolidator Grant in the field of 'Sciences of the Universe'.

Winning this Consolidator Grant is a new success for the Solar Physics group at the IAC, which is also the driving force behind the project to build the “European Solar Telescope” (EST), one of the European strategic scientific installations, which should be built at the Canary Island Observatories.

ERC Grants

Among the support programmes with which the European Union can promote scientific initiatives with international impact, the ERC Consolidator Grants are those which receive the greatest degree of economic support, as they are projects from all areas of science which are on the frontiers of knowledge. With these programmes it is expected that the research which is funded opens the way to scientific and technological results and new areas of research which, in the last analysis, can generate new ideas which give an impulse to innovation and invention in companies and tackle social challenges.

Contact at the IAC: Elena Khomenko (khomenko [at] iac.es (khomenko[at]iac[dot]es))

News type
Press release
Scope
Observatorios de Canarias
General public
Communications media

It may interest you

  • Nayra Rodríguez Eugenio, director of the AEACI, welcomes the participants of the school
    Press release
    The IAC is celebrating 10 years of Educational Adventure in Astronomy
    Yesterday saw the start of the 10th International School Astronomy Education Adventure in the Canary Islands (AEACI 2024) which will be celebrated during the full week in the IACTEC building in La Laguna (Tenerife), and which 65 teachers from 23 countries are attending. This school, organized by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) together with other scientific and educational institutions, has reached its tenth anniversary, and has given training in the teaching of astronomy to 600 teachers from all over the world. With the title “Explore the Universe with us” the AEACI 2024 has
    Advertised on
  • An artist’s concept of the exoplanet SPECULOOS-3 b orbiting its red dwarf star. The planet is as big around as Earth, while its star is slightly bigger than Jupiter – but much more massive. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
    Press release
    Astronomers discover Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting ultra-cool star
    An international scientific team, with the participation of researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has found a new world similar in size to our planet orbiting an ultra-cold red dwarf located about 55 light-years away. Observations from the SPECULOOS telescope network, which includes the ARTEMIS telescope at the Teide Observatory in Tenerife, have made this discovery possible. The Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma, has also played a key role in confirming the discovery, providing some of the most accurate ground
    Advertised on
  • Simulation illustrating the distribution of dark matter particles expected in a low-mass galaxy if the dark matter did not collide (in orange, concentrated towards the center) versus the observed dark matter (in blue, far more dispersed) / Gabriel Pérez (IAC)
    Press release
    Researchers from the IAC have discovered that dark matter experiences forces beyond gravity
    The existence of dark matter is likely one of the most perplexing problems facing the scientific community, and unraveling its nature has become one of the primary goals of modern physics. In simple terms, we do not know what dark matter is made of, despite accounting for 85% of all the matter in the Universe. A study led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias concludes that dark matter does not behave as described by the dominant paradigm, which states that dark matter particles only interact with each other and with ordinary matter through gravity. The IAC study reveals that dark
    Advertised on