Latest Plasma physics Stories

By Kim Gudeman, University of IllinoisResearchers at the University of Illinois have become the first to record an airglow signature in the upper atmosphere produced by a tsunami using a camera system based in Maui, Hawaii.The signature, caused by the March 11 earthquake that devastated Japan, was observed in an airglow layer 250 kilometers above the earth's surface. It preceded the tsunami by one hour, suggesting that the technology could be used as an early-warning system in the future. The...

Those who study the sun face an unavoidable hurdle in their research "“ their observations must be done from afar. Relying on images and data collected from 90 million miles away, however, makes it tough to measure the invisible magnetic fields sweeping around the sun.Scientists must learn more about these fields because they are crucial to understanding how coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, travel through space -- sometimes toward Earth where they can damage satellites. Now NASA researchers...

By Dr. Tony Phillips - Science@NASAOn June 7, 2011, Earth-orbiting satellites detected a flash of X-rays coming from the western edge of the solar disk. Registering only "M" (for medium) on the Richter scale of solar flares, the blast at first appeared to be a run-of-the-mill eruption--that is, until researchers looked at the movies."We'd never seen anything like it," says Alex Young, a solar physicist at the Goddard Space Flight Center. "Half of the sun appeared to...

WHITE SPRINGS, Fla., July 7, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA and others are warning of oncoming solar flares that will be similar to the 1882 TRANSIT OF VENUS solar storm that burned up Western Union which was the only technology then. Experts advise oncoming flares will burn up anything solid-state such as computers, radio and TV transmitters and cell towers as they all use some form of DC 70 Volt bus systems. Eastern Canada was hit by a small flare in 1989 and it burned out power...

Some 50 miles up in the sky begins a dynamic region of the atmosphere known as the ionosphere. The region is filled with charged particles created by extreme ultraviolet radiation from the sun. At the base of the ionosphere, charged particle motions create a global current called the "atmospheric dynamo." Generally moving in loops from the equator to the poles, the dynamo changes daily based on solar heating and magnetic activity "“ but what keeps it moving isn't well...

High speed plasma flows, often referred to as jets, are extremely common across the Universe. Such jets are observed in Earth's magnetosphere, in solar flares, and near various objects powered by black holes. New insights into the processes that modify these streams of ionized particles have been provided by rare in situ measurements of plasma flows made by ESA's Cluster spacecraft.Most visible matter in the Universe exists as plasma, an extremely hot gas in which atoms have been stripped of...

Genesis mission yields solar isotopic composition despite hard landingTwo papers in this week's issue of Science report the first oxygen and nitrogen isotopic measurements of the Sun, demonstrating that they are very different from the same elements on Earth. These results were the top two priorities of NASA's Genesis mission, which was the first spacecraft to return from beyond the Moon, crashing in the Utah desert in 2004 after its parachute failed to deploy during re-entry.Most of the...

By Dr. Tony Phillips - Science@NASAIn Sept. 1859, on the eve of a below-average1 solar cycle, the sun unleashed one of the most powerful storms in centuries. The underlying flare was so unusual, researchers still aren't sure how to categorize it.  The blast peppered Earth with the most energetic protons in half-a-millennium, induced electrical currents that set telegraph offices on fire, and sparked Northern Lights over Cuba and Hawaii.This week, officials have gathered at the National...

NASA said Wednesday that Voyager 1 could cross over into the frontier of interstellar space at any time and much earlier than previously thought. Data from Voyager's low-energy charged particle instrument have indicated that the outward speed of the charged particles streaming from the sun has slowed to zero. The stagnation of this solar wind has continued through at least February 2011, marking a thick, previously unpredicted "transition zone" at the edge of our solar...

Scientists at George Mason University discovered that a phenomenon called a giant magnetic rope is the source for solar storms. The researchers made the discovery by using images from the NASA Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) spacecraft.Scientists had previously been unable to prove that the magnetic rope was the cause of solar storms. However, using images taken by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) telescope aboard the SDO, the team was able to pinpoint an area of the sun where a...