Latest Plasma physics Stories
A light bulb-shaped eruption leaps from the Sun and blasts into space in this archival image from the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, SOHO. SOHO captured the scene on 27 February 2000, watching as a large filament rose from the Sun’s broiling atmosphere and evolved into the coronal mass ejection loop seen here. A coronal mass ejection – or CME – is a huge cloud of magnetised plasma ejected from the Sun’s atmosphere – the corona – and launched into interplanetary...
[ Watch the Video ] redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online In what can be described as a melding of astronomy and post-Impressionist art, one NASA solar scientist has developed a new technique that uses bright, bold colors to share information about the heating and cooling of various parts of the sun. Nicholeen Viall of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland innovated this new method, which uses various hues splashed across a yellow background...
[ Video 1 ] | [ Video 2 ] redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online A telescope launched on board a NASA sounding rocket earlier this month has captured the highest-resolution images of the sun's corona, the US space agency announced on Friday. The 16-megapixel images of the million-degree atmosphere of the sun were captured in an extreme-ultraviolet wavelength of light by the High Resolution Coronal Images (Hi-C) telescope, according to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center...
[ Watch the Video ] redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online A coronal mass ejection (CME) associated with a solar flare emitted early Thursday morning is unlikely to reach Earth, but it could affect one of the two Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) satellites currently orbiting the sun, NASA officials posted on the agency's official website. According to the US space agency, the sun emitted a mid-level (M7.7) flare on July 19. The flare, which began at...
A stunning image showing Aurora Australis – the Southern Lights – glowing over Concordia station in the Antarctic, one of the remotest places on Earth, on 18 July 2012. It was taken by ESA-sponsored scientist Alexander Kumar and his colleague Erick Bondoux from about 1 km from the station, located in the Antarctic at 75°S latitude. The French–Italian Concordia station's programme of research includes glaciology, human biology and the atmosphere. ESA uses the base to prepare for...
WASHINGTON, July 20, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A telescope launched July 11 aboard a NASA sounding rocket has captured the highest-resolution images ever taken of the sun's million-degree atmosphere called the corona. The clarity of the images can help scientists better understand the behavior of the solar atmosphere and its impacts on Earth's space environment. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) "These revolutionary images of the sun demonstrate the...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The Sun and the dynamic space weather system that envelops the Earth are what researchers are trying to get a better understanding of with the help of Heliophysics nuggets -- collections of early scientific results, new research techniques and instrument updates. More than 99 percent of the matter found in the universe resembles nothing like what we have here on Earth, according to scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight...
[ Watch the Video ] redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online A solar storm, scheduled to arrive Saturday morning and last through the end of the day on Sunday, is expected to put on a show for sky-gazers but should otherwise have little to no effect, according to scientists. According to the Associated Press (AP), the storm began on Thursday, as the sun unleashed a powerful solar flare -- the sixth recorded by scientists this year. The NOAA Space Weather Prediction...
MONTREAL, July 11, 2012 /PRNewswire/ - PyroGenesis Canada Inc. ("PyroGenesis" or the "Company") (TSXV: PYR), an environmental solutions company that designs, develops and manufactures plasma waste-to-energy systems and plasma torch products, announced today that it has been awarded a follow-on contract from a Multinational Mining and Metallurgical Company, which has requested that its name, as well as the details of the process be withheld for competitive reasons. As a result of...
DARIEN, Conn., July 11, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- When the Solar Impulse HB-SIA, a solar plane that can fly day or night without any fuel, completes the final leg of its 5000 km round trip journey between Switzerland and Morocco it will have made history and paved the way for a new frontier in aviation. It is this accomplishment and its impact on the future potential in solar flight that has caught the eye of Soluxe Solar, a Connecticut-based solar company that honors major...
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\")
