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NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has just completed its 23rd close approach to the Sun, once again flying through the solar corona at a blistering 430,000 miles per hour. Credit: Johns Hopkins University/APL/Steve Gribben ================================================================================== NASA’s Parker Solar Probe once again dived deep into the Sun’s atmosphere, matching its own record for speed and proximity. Racing at 430,000 mph and skimming just 3.8 million miles from the solar surface, the probe gathered rare data from within the Sun’s corona. On March 22, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe completed its 23rd close encounter with the Sun, reaching a distance of just 3.8 million...

A NASA spacecraft orbiting Jupiter has just witnessed some of the most extreme volcanic eruptions ever seen in the solar system, coming from a giant underground magma chamber on the "tormented" Jovian moon Io. The energy pouring from this record-breaking hot spot far exceeds the amount of power we are producing on Earth, researchers say. Io is Jupiter's third-largest moon, spanning roughly 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) across, which makes it slightly bigger than Earth's moon. It orbits Jupiter at a distance of around 262,000 miles (422,000 km) — also similar to how far away the moon orbits Earth — but...

A massive hotspot — larger the Earth’s Lake Superior — can be seen just to the right of Io’s south pole in this annotated image taken by the JIRAM infrared imager aboard NASA’s Juno on December 27, 2024, during the spacecraft’s flyby of the Jovian moon. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM NASA’s Juno spacecraft has uncovered an immense volcanic hot spot on Jupiter’s moon Io, surpassing any previously recorded eruptions in the solar system. This fiery inferno, detected by the JIRAM instrument, radiates over 80 trillion watts and dwarfs the infamous Loki Patera. Even by the standards of Io, the most volcanic celestial...

new planet-wide electric field that is as fundamental to Earth as gravity has been discovered in a major scientific breakthrough. The ambipolar electric field, which begins 150 miles above the planet, has been described as a “great invisible force” that lifts up the sky and is responsible for the polar winds. The polar winds interact with the jet streams to help drive the majority of weather patterns across the globe. Until now, the field had only been theorised, but a Nasa team, which includes scientists from the University of Leicester, has now sent a rocket into the field and measured...

In November 2021, the Parker Solar Probe skimmed within a more-than-hair-singeing 8.5 million kilometers (5.3 million miles) of the Sun, a feat enabling it to detect the fine structure of the solar wind as it gusted tons of charged particles out into the Solar System through a hole in the Sun's corona, or atmosphere.The probe's readings give us the closest look yet at how the fast solar wind is generated, suggesting that a specific type of magnetic reconnection is what drives this powerful force of nature, according to a team of physicists led by Stuart Bale of the University of...

Red giant star Betelgeuse. (ALMA - ESO/NAOJ/NRAO, E/O'Gorman/P.Kervella) Since what has come to be known as the Great Dimming that took place in the latter half of 2019 and early 2020, the red giant star Betelgeuse just will not stop with the wackiness. The dying star's regular cycles of brightness fluctuation have changed, and now Betelgeuse has grown uncharacteristically bright. At the time of writing, it was sitting at 142 percent of its normal brightness. It's been fluctuating back and forth on a small scale but on a steady upward trend for months and hit a recent peak of 156...

The South Atlantic Anomaly is a location in the southern Atlantic where the innermost portions of the natural zone of energetic charged particles encircling Earth, known as the Van Allen radiation belt, makes its closest approach to the planet. The resulting outflow of energized particles produces a higher yield of ionizing radiation detectable by satellites orbiting Earth. Our planet’s geomagnetic field undergoes constant changes that result from the activity occurring in the Earth’s core, which current models aren’t capable of easily predicting. Because of this, the World Magnetic Model can only offer a good estimate of the Earth’s geomagnetic activity...

Upsurge in big earthquakes predicted for 2018 as Earth rotation slows Scientists say number of severe quakes is likely to rise strongly next year because of a periodic slowing of the Earth’s rotation Scientists have warned there could be a big increase in numbers of devastating earthquakes around the world next year. They believe variations in the speed of Earth’s rotation could trigger intense seismic activity, particularly in heavily populated tropical regions. Although such fluctuations in rotation are small – changing the length of the day by a millisecond – they could still be implicated in the release of vast...

Ever feel like there’s just not enough time in the day? Turns out, you might be onto something. Earth is rotating faster than it has in the last half-century, resulting in our days being ever-so-slightly shorter than we’re used to. And while it’s an infinitesimally small difference, it’s become a big headache for physicists, computer programmers and even stockbrokers. Why Earth rotates Our solar system formed about 4.5 billion years ago, when a dense cloud of interstellar dust and gas collapsed in on itself and began to spin. There are vestiges of this original movement in our planet’s current rotation,...

Planet Earth has recorded its shortest day since scientists began using atomic clocks to measure the speed of its rotation. Earth’s time systems can prove fairly baffling for anyone who doesn’t have a PhD in Horology, as we learnt the hard way trying to figure out why the clocks were going forward as a child – only understanding that we were being dragged out of bed for school an hour earlier than the week before. But the plot thickens further still, as Earth is actually spinning faster than it used to and recently recorded a time that was the fastest...

Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon launched a public effort Monday to scrap the leap second, an occasional extra tick that keeps clocks in sync with the Earth's actual rotation. US and French timekeeping authorities concur.Since 1972, the world's timekeeping authorities have added a leap second 27 times to the global clock known as the International Atomic Time (TAI). Instead of 23:59:59 changing to 0:0:0 at midnight, an extra 23:59:60 is tucked in. That causes a lot of indigestion for computers, which rely on a network of precise timekeeping servers to schedule events and to record the exact sequence of activities...

“It could happen in a matter of months,” says Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center. ________________ “The sun is entering one of the deepest Solar Minima of the Space Age,” wrote Dr Tony Phillips just six weeks ago, on 27 Sep 2018. Sunspots have been absent for most of 2018 and Earth’s upper atmosphere is responding, says Phillips, editor of spaceweather.com. Data from NASA’s TIMED satellite show that the thermosphere (the uppermost layer of air around our planet) is cooling and shrinking, literally decreasing the radius of the atmosphere. To help track the latest developments, Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s...

Planetary effects are too small by several orders of magnitude to be a main cause of the solar cycle.Argiris Diamantis writes in with this tip: Professor Cornelis de Jager from the Netherlands has put a new publication on his website. It is a study of Dirk K. Callebaut, Cornelis de Jager and Silvia Duhau. They conclude that planetary effects are too small by several orders of magnitude to be a main cause of the solar cycle. A planetary explanation of the solar cycle is hardly possible.The paper is titled:The influence of planetary attractions on the solar tachocline Dirk K. Callebaut...

The deadly tsunami on December 26, 2004 was the result of Saturn, Moon, Earth and the Sun falling in a straight line, claims a retired scientist of Department of Atomic Energy. Paramahamsa Tewari, who supervised construction of Narora and Kaiga atomic plants and authored controversial "space vortex theory", says his conclusion about the cause of tsunami stems from his theory that all spinning cosmic objects including the Sun develop electrical fields that repel each other. On the fateful day, Saturn, Moon, Earth and the Sun were perfectly aligned. As a result, Earth was subjected to the repulsive electrical force of...

Co-Writer/Narrator: Brian McManus | Writer: Barnaby MartinThe Problem with the Next Moon MissionJuly 10, 2022 | Real Engineering

Two decades worth of observations revealed unexpected cooling of the solar system's most distant planet Neptune amid its astronomical summer. Neptune is orbiting 30 times farther away from the sun than Earth with one year lasting 165 Earth years. The ice giant's seasons, too, last much longer than those on Earth — more than 40 Earth-years each. As the planet moved into its southern summer over the past two decades, astronomers observed its average global temperatures plummet by a staggering 14 degrees Fahrenheit (8 degrees Celsius). The observed cooling, however, wasn't uniform, the researchers said in the statement. Measurements of...

The further we move away from a heat source, the cooler the air gets... the surface of the Sun starts at 6000 degC, but over a short distance of only a few hundred kilometers, it suddenly heats up to more than a million degrees, becoming its atmosphere, or corona...The popular theories are based on heating caused by turbulence, and heating caused by a type of magnetic wave called ion cyclotron waves.“Both, however, have some problem – turbulence struggles to explain why Hydrogen, Helium and Oxygen in the gas become as hot as they do, while electrons remain surprisingly cold; while...

The current work involves the creation of unusual excitons in the material nickel phosphorus trisulfide (NiPS3). These excitons are "dressed" or affected by the environment that surrounds them. In this case that environment is the magnetism. The physicists found that a pulse of light causes each of the little electron "needles" in NiPS3 to start rotating around in a circle. The rotating spins are synchronized and form a wave throughout the material, known as a spin wave. Spin waves can be used in spin electronics, or spintronics... Spintronics essentially uses electrons' spin to go beyond electronics, which is based on...

Source:   University Of Missouri-Rolla (http://www.umr.edu) Date:   Posted 7/17/2002 The Sun: A Great Ball Of Iron? For years, scientists have assumed that the sun is an enormous mass of hydrogen. But in a paper presented before the American Astronomical Society, Dr. Oliver Manuel, a professor of nuclear chemistry at UMR, says iron, not hydrogen, is the sun's most abundant element. Manuel claims that hydrogen fusion creates some of the sun's heat, as hydrogen -- the lightest of all elements -- moves to the sun's surface. But most of the heat comes from the core of an exploded supernova...

Why is Earth pulsating every 26 seconds, and why canÂ’t scientists explain it after 60 years? This is an enigma wrapped in a periodically predictable mystery motion. It could be a harmonic phenomenon, a regular seismic chirp caused by the sunÂ’s energy, or a beacon drawing scientists to its source to begin a treasure hunt. âž¡ The world is weird. We'll show you how it works. In the early 1960s, a geologist named Jack Oliver first documented the pulse, also known as a "microseism," according to Discover. Oliver, who worked at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory at the time, heard...