Fast solar wind causes aurora light shows

On the night of Oct. 8, 2015, a photographer in Harstad, Norway captured this image of the dancing northern lights. Auroras are created when fast-moving, magnetic solar material strikes Earth's magnetic bubble, the magnetosphere. ...

Exoplanet aurora: An out-of-this-world sight

Earth's aurorae, or Northern and Southern Lights, provide a dazzling light show to people living in the polar regions. Shimmering curtains of green and red undulate across the sky like a living thing. New research shows that ...

Earlier geomagnetic storm prediction wins us time to prepare

Scientists at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Russia), together with colleagues from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics (Germany), the University of Graz & the Kanzelhöhe Observatory (Austria), the ...

How space storms miscue train signals

In July 1982, train signals in Sweden misfired and erroneously turned red. The culprit, believe it or not, was a space storm that started 150 million kilometers (93 million miles) away.

Paleomagnetists put controversy to rest

(PhysOrg.com) -- Princeton University scientists have shown that, in ancient times, the Earth's magnetic field was structured like the two-pole model of today, suggesting that the methods geoscientists use to reconstruct ...

Space weather threatens high-tech life

Shortly after 4 a.m. on a crisp, cloudless September morning in 1859, the sky above what is currently Colorado erupted in bright red and green colors. Fooled by the brightness into thinking it was an early dawn, gold-rush ...

Earth's iron core is surprisingly weak, researchers say

The massive ball of iron sitting at the center of Earth is not quite as "rock-solid" as has been thought, say two Stanford mineral physicists. By conducting experiments that simulate the immense pressures deep in the planet's ...

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