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In November 2021, the Parker Solar Probe skimmed within a more-than-hair-singeing 8.5 million kilometers (5.3 million miles) of the Sun, a feat enabling it to detect the fine structure of the solar wind as it gusted tons of charged particles out into the Solar System through a hole in the Sun's corona, or atmosphere.The probe's readings give us the closest look yet at how the fast solar wind is generated, suggesting that a specific type of magnetic reconnection is what drives this powerful force of nature, according to a team of physicists led by Stuart Bale of the University of...

Red giant star Betelgeuse. (ALMA - ESO/NAOJ/NRAO, E/O'Gorman/P.Kervella) Since what has come to be known as the Great Dimming that took place in the latter half of 2019 and early 2020, the red giant star Betelgeuse just will not stop with the wackiness. The dying star's regular cycles of brightness fluctuation have changed, and now Betelgeuse has grown uncharacteristically bright. At the time of writing, it was sitting at 142 percent of its normal brightness. It's been fluctuating back and forth on a small scale but on a steady upward trend for months and hit a recent peak of 156...

The South Atlantic Anomaly is a location in the southern Atlantic where the innermost portions of the natural zone of energetic charged particles encircling Earth, known as the Van Allen radiation belt, makes its closest approach to the planet. The resulting outflow of energized particles produces a higher yield of ionizing radiation detectable by satellites orbiting Earth. Our planet’s geomagnetic field undergoes constant changes that result from the activity occurring in the Earth’s core, which current models aren’t capable of easily predicting. Because of this, the World Magnetic Model can only offer a good estimate of the Earth’s geomagnetic activity...

Upsurge in big earthquakes predicted for 2018 as Earth rotation slows Scientists say number of severe quakes is likely to rise strongly next year because of a periodic slowing of the Earth’s rotation Scientists have warned there could be a big increase in numbers of devastating earthquakes around the world next year. They believe variations in the speed of Earth’s rotation could trigger intense seismic activity, particularly in heavily populated tropical regions. Although such fluctuations in rotation are small – changing the length of the day by a millisecond – they could still be implicated in the release of vast...

Ever feel like there’s just not enough time in the day? Turns out, you might be onto something. Earth is rotating faster than it has in the last half-century, resulting in our days being ever-so-slightly shorter than we’re used to. And while it’s an infinitesimally small difference, it’s become a big headache for physicists, computer programmers and even stockbrokers. Why Earth rotates Our solar system formed about 4.5 billion years ago, when a dense cloud of interstellar dust and gas collapsed in on itself and began to spin. There are vestiges of this original movement in our planet’s current rotation,...

Planet Earth has recorded its shortest day since scientists began using atomic clocks to measure the speed of its rotation. Earth’s time systems can prove fairly baffling for anyone who doesn’t have a PhD in Horology, as we learnt the hard way trying to figure out why the clocks were going forward as a child – only understanding that we were being dragged out of bed for school an hour earlier than the week before. But the plot thickens further still, as Earth is actually spinning faster than it used to and recently recorded a time that was the fastest...

Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon launched a public effort Monday to scrap the leap second, an occasional extra tick that keeps clocks in sync with the Earth's actual rotation. US and French timekeeping authorities concur.Since 1972, the world's timekeeping authorities have added a leap second 27 times to the global clock known as the International Atomic Time (TAI). Instead of 23:59:59 changing to 0:0:0 at midnight, an extra 23:59:60 is tucked in. That causes a lot of indigestion for computers, which rely on a network of precise timekeeping servers to schedule events and to record the exact sequence of activities...

“It could happen in a matter of months,” says Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center. ________________ “The sun is entering one of the deepest Solar Minima of the Space Age,” wrote Dr Tony Phillips just six weeks ago, on 27 Sep 2018. Sunspots have been absent for most of 2018 and Earth’s upper atmosphere is responding, says Phillips, editor of spaceweather.com. Data from NASA’s TIMED satellite show that the thermosphere (the uppermost layer of air around our planet) is cooling and shrinking, literally decreasing the radius of the atmosphere. To help track the latest developments, Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s...

Planetary effects are too small by several orders of magnitude to be a main cause of the solar cycle.Argiris Diamantis writes in with this tip: Professor Cornelis de Jager from the Netherlands has put a new publication on his website. It is a study of Dirk K. Callebaut, Cornelis de Jager and Silvia Duhau. They conclude that planetary effects are too small by several orders of magnitude to be a main cause of the solar cycle. A planetary explanation of the solar cycle is hardly possible.The paper is titled:The influence of planetary attractions on the solar tachocline Dirk K. Callebaut...

The deadly tsunami on December 26, 2004 was the result of Saturn, Moon, Earth and the Sun falling in a straight line, claims a retired scientist of Department of Atomic Energy. Paramahamsa Tewari, who supervised construction of Narora and Kaiga atomic plants and authored controversial "space vortex theory", says his conclusion about the cause of tsunami stems from his theory that all spinning cosmic objects including the Sun develop electrical fields that repel each other. On the fateful day, Saturn, Moon, Earth and the Sun were perfectly aligned. As a result, Earth was subjected to the repulsive electrical force of...

Co-Writer/Narrator: Brian McManus | Writer: Barnaby MartinThe Problem with the Next Moon MissionJuly 10, 2022 | Real Engineering

Two decades worth of observations revealed unexpected cooling of the solar system's most distant planet Neptune amid its astronomical summer. Neptune is orbiting 30 times farther away from the sun than Earth with one year lasting 165 Earth years. The ice giant's seasons, too, last much longer than those on Earth — more than 40 Earth-years each. As the planet moved into its southern summer over the past two decades, astronomers observed its average global temperatures plummet by a staggering 14 degrees Fahrenheit (8 degrees Celsius). The observed cooling, however, wasn't uniform, the researchers said in the statement. Measurements of...

The further we move away from a heat source, the cooler the air gets... the surface of the Sun starts at 6000 degC, but over a short distance of only a few hundred kilometers, it suddenly heats up to more than a million degrees, becoming its atmosphere, or corona...The popular theories are based on heating caused by turbulence, and heating caused by a type of magnetic wave called ion cyclotron waves.“Both, however, have some problem – turbulence struggles to explain why Hydrogen, Helium and Oxygen in the gas become as hot as they do, while electrons remain surprisingly cold; while...

The current work involves the creation of unusual excitons in the material nickel phosphorus trisulfide (NiPS3). These excitons are "dressed" or affected by the environment that surrounds them. In this case that environment is the magnetism. The physicists found that a pulse of light causes each of the little electron "needles" in NiPS3 to start rotating around in a circle. The rotating spins are synchronized and form a wave throughout the material, known as a spin wave. Spin waves can be used in spin electronics, or spintronics... Spintronics essentially uses electrons' spin to go beyond electronics, which is based on...

Source:   University Of Missouri-Rolla (http://www.umr.edu) Date:   Posted 7/17/2002 The Sun: A Great Ball Of Iron? For years, scientists have assumed that the sun is an enormous mass of hydrogen. But in a paper presented before the American Astronomical Society, Dr. Oliver Manuel, a professor of nuclear chemistry at UMR, says iron, not hydrogen, is the sun's most abundant element. Manuel claims that hydrogen fusion creates some of the sun's heat, as hydrogen -- the lightest of all elements -- moves to the sun's surface. But most of the heat comes from the core of an exploded supernova...

Why is Earth pulsating every 26 seconds, and why canÂ’t scientists explain it after 60 years? This is an enigma wrapped in a periodically predictable mystery motion. It could be a harmonic phenomenon, a regular seismic chirp caused by the sunÂ’s energy, or a beacon drawing scientists to its source to begin a treasure hunt. âž¡ The world is weird. We'll show you how it works. In the early 1960s, a geologist named Jack Oliver first documented the pulse, also known as a "microseism," according to Discover. Oliver, who worked at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory at the time, heard...

A digital terrain model of Valles Marineris. (ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum), CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A vast system of canyons that dramatically scars the face of Mars could be harboring reserves of hidden water. An unusually high quantity of hydrogen has been detected in the heart of the 4,000 kilometers (2,485 miles) of canyons known as Valles Marineris, nicknamed the Grand Canyon of Mars. We know this thanks to new data from the ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter's FREND instrument. The finding suggests that, at depths up to a meter (three feet) below the surface, the soil in the...

For the first time in history, a spacecraft has touched the Sun. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has now flown through the Sun’s upper atmosphere – the corona – and sampled particles and magnetic fields there. The new milestone marks one major step for Parker Solar Probe and one giant leap for solar science. Just as landing on the Moon allowed scientists to understand how it was formed, touching the very stuff the Sun is made of will help scientists uncover critical information about our closest star and its influence on the solar system. ... ...During the flyby, Parker Solar Probe...

Details regarding the incoming space rock have been collected by NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS). The agency noted that the asteroid, which has been identified as 2019 WW, is currently flying across space towards Earth at an average speed of almost 22,000 miles per hour. According to CNEOS, the asteroid has an estimated diameter of 236 feet, making it longer than the wingspan of a Boeing 747 plane. 2019 WW has been labeled as an Apollo asteroid due to its natural orbit. Like other Apollo asteroids, 2019 WW follows a wide orbit around the Sun and the Earth....

Those who can remember a half century back will recall these words, spoken by Captain James Kirk of the starship Enterprise at the beginning of each episode of Star Trek: “Space—the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission—to explore strange new worlds—to seek out new life and new civilizations—to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Although the original series lasted only three years and 79 episodes, it spawned follow-on series and has become a cult classic. But this essay is not about classic science fiction, the starship Enterprise, or Captain Kirk. Yet...