Welcome

I’m Michal Golan, a PhD student and early-career researcher at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, specializing in space plasma physics. Research focuses on collisionless shock waves heliophysics, magnetospheric dynamics, and large-scale plasma processes, using satellite data from NASA missions including MMS and OMNI datasets.

I am mentored by Prof. Michael Gedalin (Department of Physics, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev).

BGU Google Scholar ORCID Web of Science ResearchGate LinkedIn Frontiers Loop Wikidata

Research Interests

  • Earth’s bow shock, foreshock, and downstream wave activity
  • Quasi-parallel / quasi-perpendicular shock structure
  • MMS in-situ plasma and magnetic-field analysis

Selected Publications

Full publication list on Google Scholar

Research Summary

Our planet is continuously exposed to the solar wind—a fast, supersonic flow of charged particles emitted by the Sun. When this plasma encounters Earth’s magnetic field, it forms a collisionless shock wave known as the bow shock, analogous to a sonic boom but occurring in space.

Collisionless shocks are fundamental plasma structures found throughout the universe, from planetary environments to supernova remnants and galaxy clusters. However, Earth’s bow shock is one of the very few locations where such shocks can be measured directly by spacecraft, making it a unique natural laboratory for shock physics.

Our research focuses on resolving the internal structure of collisionless shocks using high-resolution in-situ measurements from NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission. By applying conservation relations, We investigate how magnetic, thermal, and dynamic pressures evolve across shock transitions, with the goal of constraining the microphysical processes governing shock formation and downstream relaxation.

Publications

  1. Observations of Persistent Downstream Magnetic Oscillations at the Earth Bow Shock
    M. Golan, M. Gedalin (2025), Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.
    doi:10.1029/2025JA034321
  2. Electron Heating in Shocks: Statistics and Comparison
    M. Gedalin, M. Golan, J. Vink, N. Ganushkina, M. Balikhin (2023), Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.
    doi:10.1029/2023JA031627
  3. Change of Rankine–Hugoniot Relations during Postshock Relaxation of Anisotropic Distributions
    M. Gedalin, M. Golan, N. V. Pogorelov, V. Roytershteyn (2022), The Astrophysical Journal, 940(1), 21.
    doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ac958d

For the complete and up-to-date list, see Google Scholar.

Teaching

Designed and delivered lectures, problem sets, and laboratory sessions for physics undergraduates (B.Sc. and M.Sc. level) as well as for engineering students across multiple disciplines.

Courses taught

  • Thermodynamics tutorials
  • Statistical Mechanics tutorials
  • Physics IB tutorials— Classical Mechanics
  • Physics II Workshops, IIB tutorials — Electromagnetism
  • Physics IIIA tutorials — Waves & Optics
  • Quantum Mechanics I academic reinforcement
  • Electrodynamics academic reinforcement

Brief CV

Not available yet.

Contact

Email: golanmic@post.bgu.ac.il
GitHub: michalgolanorbiter