Latest Jets Stories

ESA Set against a star-studded backdrop and a splash of the Milky Way, the green glow of an auroral curtain pervades the permanently dark winter skies of the South Pole. The only sign of life here is the Concordia research station that ESA uses to prepare for future long-duration missions beyond Earth. The site also caters to scientific research from geology and glaciology to climate change, astronomy and planetary magnetic fields. Even though the Sun barely peeks above the horizon...

ESA’s quartet of satellites studying Earth’s magnetosphere, Cluster, has discovered that our protective magnetic bubble lets the solar wind in under a wider range of conditions than previously believed. Earth’s magnetic field is our planet’s first line of defense against the bombardment of the solar wind. This stream of plasma is launched by the Sun and travels across the Solar System, carrying its own magnetic field with it. Depending on how the solar wind’s interplanetary...

[ Watch the Video: High Speed Video Of Shock Diamond ] April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A supersonic jet of material that looks amazingly similar to the afterburner flow of a fighter jet is blasting over two million light-years from the center of a distant galaxy. The big difference, however, is that the jet engine responsible for this material is a supermassive black hole and the material is moving at nearly the speed of light. A new study, published this past...

[WATCH VIDEO: A Meteor Shower From Halley's Comet] Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Throughout the year Earth’s denizens are offered a number of good opportunities to witness meteor showers illuminating the night skies, with streaks of white lights racing across the upper atmosphere at lightning speed. Some of these seemingly heavenly showers, such as the late-April Lyrids, the Perseids of mid-August, and the often-spectacular Leonids, which arrive in November,...

[WATCH VIDEO: A Meteor Shower From Halley's Comet] Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The National Weather Service (NWS) received numerous calls last night (October 17) from Central Valley to the Bay Area in California, with callers claiming they had witnessed a giant fireball blazing across the night sky. The fireball was reportedly witnessed between about 7:45 and 7:55 p.m. PST. “We've had a lot of calls about people who have seen a big fireball,” said...

One day ago, Super Typhoon Jelawat's eye was about 25 nautical miles in diameter, today, Sept. 27, NASA satellite data indicated that eye has grown to 36 nautical miles! The latest infrared image from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument that flies on NASA's Aqua satellite shows a clear eye in Typhoon Jelawat on Sept. 25. The cloud top temperatures of the thunderstorms surrounding the eye exceed -63 Fahrenheit (-52 Celsius) indicating that they are very powerful and heavy...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online An international team of astronomers was able to measure the radius of a black hole for the first time. Researchers measured the radius of a black hole at the center of the galaxy M87, which lies about 50 million light-years away from the Milky Way. M87 has a black hole 6 billion times more massive than the Sun, and the team was able to observe the glow of matter near the edge of the black hole, or the "event horizon," using radio...

Powerful thunderstorms wrapped tightly around Hurricane Lane's center as it continued moving through the eastern Pacific Ocean. When NASA's Terra satellite passed over Lane it captured a close-up view of the storm and noticed that Lane's eye had become cloud-filled as if being punched in the eye. Nature is expected to fight Lane more and win over the next couple of days. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument captured a close-up of Lane on Sept. 17 at 3:25...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The Universe is filled with plasma, a charged gas consisting of ions and electrons. Thin sheets, or boundaries, with currents separate large plasma regions. These boundaries are where most of the exciting action in space happens. Scientists at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics (IRF) have measured the fundamental properties of one of the waves mixing and accelerating plasmas within these sheets. These thin current sheets are...

Exploiting a favorable configuration of ESA's Cluster mission spacecraft, scientists have detected and characterized lower hybrid drift waves, a special kind of plasma waves that develop in thin boundaries both in space and in the laboratory. The measurement of fundamental properties of these waves was possible when two of the spacecraft were flying very close to one another in the tail of Earth's magnetosphere. With wavelengths of about 60 km, these waves appear to play an important role in...