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Earth's Northern Lights typically dance near the poles, but 41,000 years ago, they lit up skies over North Africa and Australia. New research reveals how dramatically Earth's magnetic field weakened and shifted during an event called the Laschamps geomagnetic excursion, potentially influencing human evolution at a pivotal moment in our history...During the Laschamps excursion, Earth's magnetic field weakened to just 10% of its current strength, while the magnetic poles shifted dramatically away from the geographic poles...Using advanced computer modeling, the research team reconstructed Earth's magnetosphere during five key periods of the excursion. At its peak around 40,977 years ago, Earth's...

Scientists report the first known observation of a variety of quasiparticle that exhibits a very peculiar behavior: it appears to have mass, but only while moving in one direction. Scientists at Pennsylvania State University recently succeeded in detecting the unusual quasiparticle while conducting studies involving a semi-metallic crystalline material. Known as a semi-Dirac fermion, this unique formation of particles was first theorized more than a decade ago, but until now had never been directly observed. The discovery potentially paves the way toward future advances in a range of emerging technologies that include power storage and novel forms of sensor technologies....

The peculiar layers could explain the ice giants' magnetic peculiarities. Uranus (left) and Neptune (right) are the ice blue giants in the outer Solar System. Image credit: Patrick Irwin/University of Oxford/NASA Uranus and Neptune were only visited once by human spacecraft when Voyager 2 passed by them almost 40 years ago. During those visits, scientists measured peculiar magnetic fields unlike those seen around other planets. A recent paper suggests that the Uranus measurements might have been messed up by the Sun, but in general, it has been difficult to explain the behavior. New research suggests that the magnetic weirdness might...

This image of Uranus from NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows the planet and its rings in new clarity. The Webb image exquisitely captures Uranus’s seasonal north polar cap, including the bright, white, inner cap and the dark lane in the bottom of the polar cap. Uranus’ dim inner and outer rings are also visible in this image, including the elusive Zeta ring—the extremely faint and diffuse ring closest to the planet. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI ************************************************************************ NASA’s Voyager 2 flyby of Uranus decades ago shaped scientists’ understanding of the planet but also introduced unexplained...

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...

The number of black spots peppering the sun's surface in August was the highest for almost 23 years, new data shows. The latest sunspot count was more than twice as high as initial forecasts predicted and is another clear sign that the sun's explosive peak, or solar maximum, is likely well underway — and will be far more active than scientists initially thought. Sunspots are regions of the sun's surface where surges of electromagnetic radiation break through the star's magnetic field, creating relatively cool patches that appear black to us thanks to an optical illusion. Along with the size and...

China has become the first country to gather samples from the far side of the moon and bring them back to Earth in a landmark achievement for the Beijing space programme. A re-entry capsule containing the precious cargo parachuted into a landing zone in the rural Siziwang Banner region of Inner Mongolia on Tuesday after being released into Earth’s orbit by the uncrewed Chang’e-6 probe....The mission’s lander spent two days collecting rock and soil from one of the oldest and largest craters on the moon, the 1,600-mile-wide South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin...

Scientists have uncovered a vast donut-shaped structure buried thousands of miles beneath our feet. Researchers from the Australian National University used seismic waves generated by earthquakes to peer into the Earth's mysterious molten core. By tracing the path of these waves through the planet, the researchers found a region a few hundred kilometres thick where they travelled two per cent slower than normal.

FTA: "The model developed by the team could help scientists better understand the 11-year solar cycle and improve the forecasting of space weather, which can disrupt GPS and communication satellites as well as dazzle night sky watchers with auroras."

...Such anomalies are known as earthquake precursors, and although researchers are aware of them, it has been difficult to definitively identify a pattern of so-called red flags that could indicate an impending earthquake. This is because of the complexity of precursor interactions and their variability in different earthquakes and geographical regions. However, with every earthquake that researchers analyze using increasingly sophisticated satellite technology, these patterns are slowly emerging.Professor Mehdi Akhoondzadeh of the University of Tehran assessed a variety of satellite data from the run up to and aftermath of two earthquakes that occurred on 6 February 2023 near the border...

Imagine a world where you couldn’t call or text anyone, you couldn’t put gas in your car, you could pay for things, and there was no tap in your water. A nightmare, right? ... Hollywood actor Dennis Quaid is warning that such a scenario isn’t a foreign possibility. During an interview with Tucker Carlson, Quaid highlighted the dangers of a solar storm that could kill more than 90 percent of the population within a year. “Basically, there is a 100 percent probability that our sun, generating what they call a GMD, which is a solar storm, that hits hard, hits...

This image shows the orientation of the magnetic field in the distant 9io9 galaxy, seen here when the Universe was only 20% of its current age — the furthest ever detection of a galaxy’s magnetic field. Dust grains within 9io9 are somewhat aligned with the galaxy’s magnetic field, and due to this, they emit polarized light, meaning that light waves oscillate along a preferred direction rather than randomly. ALMA detected this polarization signal, from which astronomers could work out the orientation of the magnetic field, shown here as curved lines overlaid on the ALMA image. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/J. Geach et...

NASA obtained new information from the exploded Tycho Supernova, which was first seen from Earth in 1752. Photo courtesy of NASA Feb. 28 (UPI) -- A group of scientists has uncovered new information from a star that exploded more than 450 years ago, propelling particles to near the speed of light. Astronomers used NASA's Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer to study the remains of a supernova called Tycho. They were able to discover how Tycho accelerates particles closer to the speed of light than any particle accelerator on Earth. "As one of the so-called historical supernovae, Tycho was observed by humanity...

Black holes are powerful cosmic reactors. They supply the energy for quasars and other active galactic nuclei (AGNs). This is due to the interplay between matter and its enormous gravitational and magnetic forces. A black hole technically lacks a magnetic field, but the dense plasma surrounding it as an accretion disc does possess a magnetic field. As plasma spirals around a black hole, the charged particles inside it create an electrical current and magnetic field. The direction of plasma flow does not spontaneously vary, hence the magnetic field is likely rather stable. Imagine the researchers’ amazement when they discovered evidence...

Researchers who have been studying medium-sized to large strong earthquakes in California have found that the local magnetic field changes 2-3 days before an earthquake. The researchers accessed magnetic field data from a collection of magnetometers at 125 sensor stations along significant faults in California in cooperation with the Google Accelerated Science team. They gathered information between 2005 and 2019, a period in which 19 earthquakes with a magnitude of 4.5 or higher struck the faults. Their multi-station analysis took into account other types of processes, such as rush hour traffic, that might have an impact on the magnetometers but...

A fiery-looking, red-orange energetic jet blasting bright light from the center of a galaxy. An artist's illustration of neutrinos originating from a high-energy Blazar Benjamin Amend, Clemson University Born in the cradle of deep space, blasting across the universe at nearly the speed of light and harnessing energy up to a million times greater than anything achieved by the world's most powerful particle accelerator, cosmic rays are atom fragments that relentlessly rain down on Earth. They get caught in our atmosphere and mess up our satellites. They threaten the health of astronauts living in orbit, even when sparse in number....

Caption:When measuring a nucleus with a certain “magic” number of neutrons — 82 — the magnetic field of the nucleus exhibits a drastic change, and the properties of these very complex nuclei appear to be governed by just one of the protons of the nucleus. Credit: Adam Vernon ================================================================================================== A curious thing happened when MIT researchers Adam Vernon and Ronald Garcia Ruiz, along an international team of scientists, recently performed an experiment in which a sensitive laser spectroscopy technique was used to measure how the nuclear electromagnetic properties of indium isotopes evolve when an extreme number of neutrons are added...

A pulsar with its jets and magnetic fields (NASA) ====================================================================== Far out in the Milky Way, roughly 22,000 light years from Earth, a star unlike any other roars with a magnetic force that beats anything physicists have ever seen. At a whopping 1.6 billion Tesla, a pulsar called Swift J0243.6+6124 smashes the previous records of around 1 billion Tesla, discovered surrounding the pulsars GRO J1008-57 and 1A 0535+262. For a bit of context, your average novelty fridge magnet comes in at around 0.001 Tesla. The more powerful MRI machines manage to hit around 3 Tesla. A few years ago, engineers...

The crack in the magnet field was created by a rare phenomenon called a co-rotating interaction region (CIR) from the Sun. CIRs are large-scale plasma structures generated in the low and mid-latitude regions of the heliosphere – the region surrounding the Sun that includes the solar magnetic field and the solar winds – when fast and slow-moving streams of solar wind interact. Like coronal mass ejections (CMEs), CIRs get flung out from the Sun towards Earth and can contain shockwaves and compressed magnetic fields that cause stormy space weather, which usually presents itself to us as pretty aurorae. This one...

https://www.sciencealert.com/images/2022-02/processed/jupiter-aurora_1024.jpg ======================================================================== Jupiter has finally been observed spitting out X-rays in high-energy wavelengths. Emanating from the giant planet's permanent auroras, and detected by NASA's space-based X-ray telescope NuSTAR, the emissions are the most energetic light seen coming from any planet in the Solar System (aside from Earth). The detection could shed light on the most powerful auroras in the Solar System, and solves a longstanding mystery: why the joint ESA-NASA Ulysses spacecraft didn't detect any Jovian X-rays in its nearly three decades of operation between 1990 and 2009. Jupiter's auroras constitute an absolutely fascinating phenomenon. At both its poles, the...