The risks of low-speed impacts with liquids

When a solid object hits a liquid, the impact produces shock waves: a process that has long occupied engineers due to its implications for design of hydraulic systems or motors. KAUST researchers now show that impacts at ...

Fast and loud—how to create sonic booms and curious clouds

Growing up beneath the Concorde flight path, I learned early on that if you heard its characteristic roar overhead you had to look far towards the horizon to see it. If you were lucky, you would see Concorde first. You could ...

Compression experiments lead to shocking results

Using acceleration 1 trillion times faster than a jet fighter in a maximum turn, researchers have gained new insight into dynamic compression of aluminum at ultrahigh strain rates.

NASA's MMS finds first interplanetary shock

The Magnetospheric Multiscale mission—MMS—has spent the past four years using high-resolution instruments to see what no other spacecraft can. Recently, MMS made the first high-resolution measurements of an interplanetary ...

Dark fireworks on the sun

On June 7, 2011, Earth-orbiting satellites detected a flash of X-rays coming from the western edge of the solar disk. Registering only "M" (for medium) on the Richter scale of solar flares, the blast at first appeared to ...

Dwarf galaxy caught ramming into a large spiral

Observations with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have revealed a massive cloud of multimillion-degree gas in a galaxy about 60 million light years from Earth. The hot gas cloud is likely caused by a collision between a ...

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