Latest Space plasmas Stories
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Scientists are warning that power grids, communications and satellites could be knocked out by a massive solar storm within the next two years. The sun will be reaching its peak in its 10-year solar activity cycle, putting the Earth at a greater risk from solar storms. During this peak, scientists say there is a heightened risk that a solar storm could knock out the communication systems that we rely on. "Governments are taking...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online It has long been thought that our Solar System was formed by the shockwave from a supernova explosion. According to this theory, the shockwave also injected material from the exploding star into a cloud of gas and dust. The newly polluted cloud formed the Sun and its surrounding planets. A new study by Alan Boss and Sandra Keiser of the Carnegie Institution for Science, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, provides the...
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...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Weather has always affected our lives, but we are increasingly reliant on technology that can be disrupted by space weather. Geomagnetic storms, which are major disturbances of the magnetosphere, cause high altitude flights to be rerouted, costing many thousands of dollars per flight; cause GPS errors of up to 151 feet; and affect the International Space Station and satellites. Geomagnetic storms and other space weather...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (Solar Dynamics Observatory) captured a mid-level solar flare on Saturday, showing us that the sun is getting prepped for its solar maximum. SDO witnessed the image on the active region of the sun named AR 1532 in the 131 Angstrom wavelength. This wavelength is typically colorized as teal, and is particularly good for catching flares, NASA said. Solar flares emit powerful bursts of radiation, which...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online In a galaxy not that far away, astronomically speaking at least, researchers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have detected the first x-rays emitted by the debris of a young supernova, SN 1957D. 15 million light years from Earth, in the M83 spiral galaxy, SN 1957D is one of only a few supernova located outside the Milky Way galaxy that is detectable in both radio and optical wavelengths, decades after the explosion itself was...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Twenty years ago, the United States relationship with Japan showed just how restored it was since the second world war, as the two countries' space agencies launched a joint mission together. The Geotail mission launched into space aboard a Delta II launch vehicle 20 years ago from this week, kick-starting a set of coordinated missions known as the International Solar Terrestrial Physics (ISTP) project. ISTP studied the magnetic...
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...
Latest Space plasmas Reference Libraries
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...
A Radio Atmospheric signal (sometimes referred to as Sferic or Spheric), is a broadband electromagnetic impulse that occurs during atmospheric lightning discharges. Sferics spread out from the lightning source and can be received thousands of miles away. A sferic, depending on atmospheric conditions, may extend anywhere from a few kHz to several tens of kHz. Sferics from far reaching storms, over 1500 miles away, are generally offset in frequency range and may be picked up as tweeks. A...
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...
