An international team – led by Dutch astronomers (SRON, NOVA and ASTRON) – has made a tantalizing discovery about the way pulsars emit radiation. The emission of X-rays and radio waves by these pulsating neutron stars is able to change dramatically in seconds, simultaneously, in a way that cannot be explained with current theory. [continue reading]
University of Leicester planetary scientists have found new evidence suggesting auroras – similar to Earth’s Aurora Borealis – occur on bodies outside our Solar System. Auroras Bigger Than the Entire Earth: This image shows X-ray auroras observed by the Chandra X-ray Observatory overlaid on a simultaneous optical image from the Hubble Space Telescope of [continue reading]
Four decades of active research and debate by the solar physics community have failed to bring consensus on what drives the Sun’s powerful coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that can have profound “space weather” effects on Earth-based power grids and satellites in near-Earth geospace. A computer visualization of the Sun (red sphere) and its magnetic [continue reading]
A group of astronomers led by Gregg Wade of the Royal Military College of Canada have used the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) at The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory and the Canada-France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea to measure the most magnetic massive star yet. Their work is published in yesterday’s [continue reading]
Exploiting a favourable configuration of ESA’s Cluster mission spacecraft, scientists have detected and characterised lower hybrid drift waves, a special kind of plasma waves that develop in thin boundaries both in space and in the laboratory. The measurement of fundamental properties of these waves was possible when two of the spacecraft were flying very [continue reading]
Our day-to-day lives exist in what physicists would call an electrically neutral environment. Desks, books, chairs and bodies don’t generally carry electricity and they don’t stick to magnets. But life on Earth is substantially different from, well, almost everywhere else. Beyond Earth’s protective atmosphere and extending all the way through interplanetary space, electrified particles [continue reading]