For well over a decade, ESA's SMOS satellite has been delivering a wealth of data to map moisture in soil and salt in the surface waters of the oceans for a better understanding of the processes driving the water cycle. While ...
Astronomy
Mar 25, 2021
0
30
The ionization of the neutral gas in an interstellar molecular cloud plays a key role in the cloud's evolution, helping to regulate the heating and cooling processes, the chemistry and molecule formation, and coupling the ...
General Physics
Mar 22, 2021
0
140
The solar wind is a flow of particles that comes off the sun at about one million miles per hour and travels throughout the entire solar system. First proposed in the 1950s by University of Chicago physicist Eugene Parker, ...
Astronomy
Mar 11, 2021
2
405
When NASA's Parker Solar Probe sent back the first observations from its voyage to the Sun, scientists found signs of a wild ocean of currents and waves quite unlike the near-Earth space much closer to our planet. This ocean ...
Astronomy
Mar 10, 2021
27
2177
About 17 years ago, J. Martin Laming, an astrophysicist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, theorized why the chemical composition of the Sun's tenuous outermost layer differs from that lower down. His theory has recently ...
Astronomy
Mar 2, 2021
1
14710
Rice University physicists have discovered a way to trap the world's coldest plasma in a magnetic bottle, a technological achievement that could advance research into clean energy, space weather and astrophysics.
Plasma Physics
Mar 1, 2021
1
241
The world experienced a few centuries of apocalyptic conditions 42,000 years ago, triggered by a reversal of the Earth's magnetic poles combined with changes in the Sun's behavior. That's the key finding of our new multidisciplinary ...
Earth Sciences
Feb 19, 2021
4
290
Name: Solar Orbiter, or "Solo' as the mission control team fondly call it, is one of the European Space Agency's pluckiest missions and is now cruising toward the sun.
Astronomy
Feb 10, 2021
0
0
Before the Apollo era, the moon was thought to be dry as a desert due to the extreme temperatures and harshness of the space environment. Many studies have since discovered lunar water: ice in shadowed polar craters, water ...
Astronomy
Jan 28, 2021
1
9283
Though they focus on the star at the center of our solar system, three of NASA's Sun-watching spacecraft have captured unique views of the planets throughout the last several months. Using instruments that look not at the ...
Space Exploration
Jan 27, 2021
1
18
