In weakly collisional plasmas such as the intracluster medium (ICM), the viscous stress and the rate of change of the magnetic energy are proportional to the local pressure anisotropy, so subject to constraints imposed by the pressure-anisotropydriven microinstabilities (mirror and firehose) and controlled by the local instantaneous plasma β. The dynamics of such plasmas can be dramatically different from a conventional MHD fluid. The plasma is expected to stay locally marginal with respect to the instabilities, but how it does this remains an open question. Two models of magnetic-field evolution are investigated. In the first, marginality is achieved via suppression of the rate of change of the field. In the second, the instabilities give rise to anomalous collisionality, reducing pressure anisotropy to marginal -at the same time decreasing viscosity and so increasing the turbulent rate of strain. Implications of these two models are studied in a simplified zero-dimensional setting. In the first model, the field grows explosively but on a time scale that scales with the initial β, while in the second, dynamical field strength can be reached in one large-scale turbulence turn-over time regardless of the initial seed. Both models produce very intermittent fields. Both also suffer from fairly strong constraints on their applicability: for typical cluster-core conditions, scale separation between the fluid motions (with account of suppressed viscous stress) and the miscoscale fluctuations breaks down at β ∼ 10 4 − 10 5 . At larger β (weaker fields), a fully collisionless plasma dynamo theory is needed to justify field growth from a tiny primordial seed. However, the models discussed here are appropriate for studying the structure of the currently observed field as well as large-scale dynamics and thermodynamics of the magnetized ICM or similarly dilute astrophysical plasmas.

K2's Campaign 9 (K2C9) will conduct a ∼3.7 deg 2 survey toward the Galactic bulge from 7/April through 1/July of 2016 that will leverage the spatial separation between K2 and the Earth to facilitate measurement of the microlens parallax π E for 127 microlensing events. These will include several that are planetary in nature as well as many shorttimescale microlensing events, which are potentially indicative of free-floating planets (FFPs). These satellite parallax measurements will in turn allow for the direct measurement of the masses of and distances to the lensing systems. In this white paper we provide an overview of the K2C9 space-and ground-based microlensing survey. Specifically, we detail the demographic questions that can be addressed by this program, including the frequency of FFPs and the Galactic distribution of exoplanets, the observational parameters of K2C9, and the array of resources dedicated to concurrent observations. Finally, we outline the avenues through which the larger community can become involved, and generally encourage participation in K2C9, which constitutes an important pathfinding mission and community exercise in anticipation of WFIRST.

The long-term variations in the orbit of the Earth govern the insolation on its surface and hence its climate. The use of the astronomical signal, whose imprint has been recovered in the geological records, has revolutionized the determination of the geological timescales. However, the orbital variations beyond 60 Myr cannot be reliably predicted because of the chaotic dynamics of the planetary orbits in the Solar System. Taking this dynamical uncertainty to account is necessary for a complete astronomical calibration of geological records. Our work addresses this problem with a statistical analysis of 120 000 orbital solutions of the secular model of the Solar System ranging from 500 Myr to 5 Gyr. We obtain the marginal probability density functions of the fundamental secular frequencies using kernel density estimation. The uncertainty of the density estimation is also obtained here in the form of confidence intervals determined by the moving block bootstrap method. The results of the secular model are shown to be in good agreement with those of the direct integrations of a comprehensive model of the Solar System. Application of our work is illustrated on two geological data sets: the Newark-Hartford records and the Libsack core.