Issue 1, 2014
Six years have passed since the ERC AstroDyn Project at Nordita was born. On 24 July 2008, a sunny day, an email said that "the panel has recommended your proposal for funding at a sufficiently high position on the priority list, which is expected to allow actual funding." In the original proposal of 2008, fourteen milestones were set. All of them have been addressed and have led to publications; see this project progress report for details. Particularly productive outcomes include Task 2 on the test-field method (10 publications), Task 7 on dynamos in spherical shell segments (13 publications), Task 8 on magnetic flux concentrations near the surface (18 publications), Task 9 on coronal mass ejections from a dynamo (6 publications), and Task 10 on convective dynamos in spherical shell (7 publications). The outcomes of these five tasks make up more than half of the 105 publications that acknowledge the ERC Advanced Grant. Some of these achievements have been reported in earlier issues of this Newsletter (two articles in issue 2/2013 and one in issue 2/2011). The Pencil-Code pencil-code.googlecode.com is an open source community effort and used heavily in this project. Over the period of the grant, the code has grown significantly: from revision 10328 of 1 February 2009 to 21669 on 9 April 2014. And that's not all: the solar activity has recovered from its deepest low since 1908 to peak sunspot numbers of around 100, as pointed out by the PI in the picture.
Center: What should a solar physics group do if not take a whiteboard under the arm and move the group meeting out onto the sun-basked lawn in front of the Nordita building.
Right: At the cake and coffee reception in January 2014 marking the conclusion of the AstroDyn project, project leader Axel Brandenburg used the most recent ISES Solar Cycle Sunspot Number Progression chart to illustrate the close correlation between the growth of the project and the number of sunspots; from the time the project ends the sunspot number is predicted to decrease again.
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