The science behind northern lights
(Phys.org)—Northern night skies have recently been alive with light. Those shimmering curtains get their start about 93 million miles away, on the sun.
(Phys.org)—Northern night skies have recently been alive with light. Those shimmering curtains get their start about 93 million miles away, on the sun.
Space Exploration
Oct 2, 2012
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(Phys.org)—Researchers from the Electric and Magnetic Field Instrument Suite and Integrated Science (EMFISIS) team at the University of Iowa have released a new recording of an intriguing and well-known phenomenon known ...
Space Exploration
Sep 14, 2012
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(Phys.org)—The Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) is Earth's vanguard. Orbiting around a point 900,000 miles away between the Earth and our sun, this satellite is ever vigilant, recording the combination of radiation—from ...
Space Exploration
Aug 30, 2012
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(Phys.org) -- On July 24, 1992, the joint JAXA/NASA Geotail mission launched into space aboard a Delta II launch vehicle. It was the vanguard for a set of coordinated missions known as the International Solar Terrestrial ...
Space Exploration
Jul 30, 2012
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Researchers working with NASA's Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft report the frequent detections of Kelvin-Helmholtz (KH) waves at the edge of the innermost planet's magnetosphere. ...
Space Exploration
May 15, 2012
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(Phys.org) -- On April 5, 2010, the sun spewed a two million-mile-per-hour stream of charged particles toward the invisible magnetic fields surrounding Earth, known as the magnetosphere. As the particles interacted with the ...
Space Exploration
Apr 12, 2012
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers studying the planet Venus have found that despite a lack of a magnetic field, the planet has magnetotails, which on Earth are part of the process known as the Northern and Southern Lights. This, ...
(PhysOrg.com) -- Since the NASA / ESA Cassini-Huygens spacecraft arrived at Saturn in 2004, astronomers and space scientists have been able to study the ringed planet and its moons in great detail. Now, for the first time, ...
Space Exploration
Mar 27, 2012
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Explosions on the sun regularly disrupt the magnetic envelope surrounding Earth, but that envelope, the magnetosphere, largely protects the surface of the planet itself from space weather with one exception. As a rule, ...
Space Exploration
Mar 23, 2012
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(PhysOrg.com) -- On March 17, the tiny MESSENGER spacecraft completed its primary mission to orbit and observe the planet Mercury for one Earth-year. The bounty of surprises from the mission has completely altered our understanding ...
Space Exploration
Mar 21, 2012
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