Latest Plasmoid Stories

Our Sun experiences regular eruptions of material into space, but solar physicists still have difficulty in explaining why these dramatic events take place. Now a group of scientists from the University of St Andrews think they have the answer: clouds of ionized gas (plasma) constrained by magnetic fields and known as 'plasmoids' that struggle to break free of the Sun's magnetic field. Dr Vasilis Archontis will present their work on Monday 18 April at the National Astronomy Meeting in...

Invisible to the naked eye, yet massive in structure around the Earth is the magnetosphere, the region of space around the planet that ebbs and flows in response to the million-mile-per-hour flow of charged particles continually blasting from the Sun. NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft, designed to image the invisible interactions occurring at the edge of the solar system, captured images of magnetospheric structures and a dynamic event occurring in the magnetosphere as...