Solar wind forms the energy source for aurora explosions. How does the Earth's magnetosphere take in the energy of the solar wind? An international team led by Hiroshi Hasegawa and Naritoshi Kitamura (ISAS/JAXA) analyzed ...
Space Exploration
Jul 22, 2016
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141
Magnetic reconnection could be the Universe's favorite way to make things explode. It operates anywhere magnetic fields pervade space--which is to say almost everywhere. On the sun magnetic reconnection causes solar flares ...
General Physics
Aug 31, 2009
8
0
With the click of a computer mouse, a scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) sends 10,000 volts of electricity into a chamber filled with hydrogen gas. The charge heats the ...
Plasma Physics
Oct 25, 2011
20
0
Researchers have uncovered a previously hidden heating process that helps explain how the atmosphere that surrounds the sun called the "solar corona" can be vastly hotter than the solar surface that emits it.
Plasma Physics
Dec 23, 2022
4
199
What a spectacle a big aurora is, its shimmering curtains and colorful rays of light illuminating a dark sky. Many people refer to aurora as the northern lights (the aurora borealis), but there are southern lights too (the ...
Planetary Sciences
Jan 21, 2022
0
109
Physicist Fatima Ebrahimi at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has published a paper showing that magnetic reconnection—the process in which magnetic field lines snap together ...
Plasma Physics
Jan 23, 2017
1
112
When the solar wind - which is really a driving rain of charged particles from the sun - strikes Earth's protective magnetic field, the shock generates roiling, turbulent magnetic fields that enshroud the planet and stretch ...
Space Exploration
May 9, 2018
96
451
Beyond Earth's atmosphere are swirling clouds of energized particles—ions and electrons—that emanate from the sun. This "solar wind" buffets the magnetosphere, the magnetic force field that surrounds Earth.
General Physics
Jan 14, 2020
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777
NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory has observed a magnetic explosion the likes of which have never been seen before. In the scorching upper reaches of the Sun's atmosphere, a prominence—a large loop of material launched ...
Astronomy
Dec 17, 2019
3
1052
The end of 2014 marks two decades of data from a NASA mission called Wind. Wind—along with 17 other missions – is part of what's called the Heliophysics Systems Observatory, a fleet of spacecraft dedicated to understanding ...
Space Exploration
Dec 30, 2014
18
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