Latest Plasma physics Stories
Watch the Video: Filament Eruption August 31, 2012 Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Scientists from NASA have discovered an enormous ‘solar whip’ on the surface of the Sun and have warned that radiation from the phenomenon is heading straight toward Earth, arriving on our doorstep sometime today. The stunning event was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and, according to a report from Mail Online’s Mark Prigg, video and images of the...
By measuring the unique properties of light on the scale of a single atom, researchers from Duke University and Imperial College, London, believe that they have characterized the limits of metal's ability in devices that enhance light. This field is known as plasmonics because scientists are trying to take advantage of plasmons, electrons that have been "excited" by light in a phenomenon that produces electromagnetic field enhancement. The enhancement achieved by metals at the nanoscale is...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online NASA has released a hauntingly beautiful composite image showing a superbubble in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The LMC is a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way located about 160,000 light years from Earth. A superbubble is a cavity, filled with 106 Kelvin gas blown into the interstellar medium by multiple supernovae and stellar winds, hundreds of light years across. These cavities are carved out of the surrounding gas by the...
MONTREAL, Aug. 30, 2012 /PRNewswire/ - PyroGenesis Canada Inc. ("PyroGenesis" or the "Company") (TSXV: PYR), announced today that it has been awarded a plasma torch system contract by an Asian company (the "Client"), the name and origin of which may not be disclosed for competitive reasons. This ten (10) month, two phase contract, with a value of $2.2 million will require PyroGenesis to design, manufacture and deliver a fully automated plasma torch system comprised of eight (8)...
Watch the Video: Lightbulb Shaped CME Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The sun sent off another coronal mass ejection (CME) last week, but this time the plasma burst showed up in the form of a light bulb. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) caught the CME light bulb with its Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) C2 instrument. This instrument is able to take images of the solar corona by blocking the light coming directly from the Sun with...
Researchers reproduce plasma loops to help understand solar physics In orbit around Earth is a wide range of satellites that we rely on for everything from television and radio feeds to GPS navigation. Although these spacecraft soar high above storms on Earth, they are still vulnerable to weather—only it's weather from the sun. Large solar flares—or plasma that erupts from the sun's surface—can cause widespread damage, both in space and on Earth, which is why researchers at the...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Magnetic turbulence is most likely the reason that solar wind moving away from our sun and our solar system is hotter than it theoretically should be, according to new research from scientists at the University of Warwick. As solar wind leaves the sun and expands beyond the solar system, it should begin to cool off due to the lack of particle collisions to dissipate energy, the university explained in a Friday press release. That...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Understanding weather patterns here on Earth is a complicated process, with scientists teasing apart different kinds of atmospheric movements, such as the great jet streams that can move across a whole hemisphere versus more localized, intricate flows, to create a whole picture. Those same methods and processes are used to understand the flows of the space weather system that links the Sun and the Earth as the Sun shoots material out...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have observed the first glimpses of a possible boundary separating ordinary nuclear matter, made up of protons and neutrons, from the seething soup of their constituent quarks and gluons using the versatility and new capabilities of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). A quark-gluon plasma (QGP) exists at extremely high temperatures or density,...
Whilst the most powerful earthquake since records began hit Japan in 2011, triggering a massive tsunami which devastated much of the country, space scientists involved in one of the 'brightest' international Sun missions continued working tirelessly at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in Sagamihara, Japan, to capture new data from our turbulent star. These latest Hinode results, to be discussed in a meeting at the University of St Andrews this week (Tuesday 14 August),...
Latest Plasma physics Reference Libraries
The prominent feature that allows for the existence of life on Earth is the Sun. Radiation from our closest star provides heat and energy to our planet, driving biological processes and providing the necessary conditions for liquid water to naturally exist. But our Sun is only but one star in this vast Universe. And as it turns out, most stars are quite different than the one that illuminates our day. For this reason, scientists have, for hundreds of years, attempted to study the other...
Solar cycles: what are they and why should we care about them? Solar cycles are made up of what are known as solar minimums (min) and solar maximums (max). We refer to a solar min at the time when the sun is not active with many sunspots, while a solar max is just the opposite when we see a large increase in sunspot activity. So how long do solar cycles last? Typically they run on what is known as an 11 year cycle from the max to the min and then start over again anew. As of 2012 we...
Solar Physics is a journal for solar and solar-stellar research and the study of solar terrestrial physics. Founded in 1967 by solar physicist Cornelis de Jager and publisher D. Reidel, the journal treats all aspects of solar physics, ranging from the internal structure of the Sun and its evolution, to outer corona and solar wind in interplanetary space. Solar Physics has four more than forty years been the principal journal for publications of fundamental research on the Sun. It is...
Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén (May 30, 1908 - April 2, 1995) was a Swedish plasma physicist born in Norrköping, Sweden. Alfvén received his PhD from the University of Uppsala in 1934. His thesis was titled "Investigations of the Ultra-short Electromagnetic Waves." He was originally trained as an electrical power engineer and later moved on to research and teaching in the fields of plasma physics. Alfvén made many contributions to plasma physics, including theories describing the...
Ring Current -- A ring current is an electric current carried by charged particles trapped in a planet's magnetosphere. It is caused by the longitudinal drift of energetic (10-200 keV) particles. Earth's Ring Current Earth's ring current is responsible for geomagnetic storms. The ring current system consists of a band, at a distance of 3-5 RE(1), which lies in the equatorial plane and circulates clockwise around the Earth (when viewed from the north). The particles of this region...
![Hinode\](/media/gallery/iris-interface-region-imaging-spectrograph/thumbs/thumbs_751917main_highres4_full.jpg "Hinode\")
