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Left: what the tunnel would look like; right: what the sky does look like. (Image Credit Below) Mysterious structures in the sky that have puzzled astronomers for decades might finally have an explanation – and it's quite something. The North Polar Spur and the Fan Region, on opposite sides of the sky, may be connected by a vast system of magnetized filaments. These form a structure resembling a tunnel that circles the Solar System, and many nearby stars besides. "If we were to look up in the sky," said astronomer Jennifer West of the University of Toronto in Canada, "we...

Huntsville AL (SPX) Apr 18, 2008 Behold the full Moon. Ancient craters and frozen lava seas lie motionless under an airless sky of profound quiet. It's a slow-motion world where even a human footprint may last millions of years. Nothing ever seems to happen there. Right? Wrong. NASA-supported scientists have realized that something does happen every month when the Moon gets a lashing from Earth's magnetic tail. "Earth's magnetotail extends well beyond the orbit of the Moon and, once a month, the Moon orbits through it," says Tim Stubbs, a University of Maryland scientist working at the Goddard Space Flight...

The northern lights (above) and their lesser-known sibling the southern lights, aurora borealis and aurora australis, respectively, undulate across the skies in hazy green and sometimes red ribbons near Earth’s polar regions. The two phenomena aren’t identical, however, and now researchers think they know why. Aurorae appear as solar wind, a gust of charged particles emitted by the sun, blows across Earth’s magnetic field. Because the charged particles flow along symmetrical lines in Earth’s magnetic field linking the north and south poles, it made sense to assume the atmospheric displays in each hemisphere would mirror each other. Advances in Earth...

Measurements from NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, aka LADEE (pronounced “laddie”) have confirmed the long-suspected presence of neon in its atmosphere ... along with isotopes of argon and helium. The relative concentrations of each of these elements also appears to depend on the time of day. “The presence of neon in the exosphere of the moon has been a subject of speculation since the Apollo missions, but no credible detections were made,” said Mehdi Benna of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, lead author of a paper describing the...

This is an image of Mercury's tail obtained from combining a full day of data from a camera aboard the STEREO-A spacecraft. The reflected sunlight off the planet's surface results in a type of over-exposure that causes Mercury to appear much larger than its actual size. The tail-like structure extending anti-sunward from the planet is visible over several days and spans an angular size exceeding that of a full Moon in the night sky.

The ion tail of Venus. Credit: Jeff Hecht, New Scientist Magazine May 31, 1997.   Feb 20, 2008Venus' Tail of the UnexpectedAncient peoples report that the planet Venus once had visible "ropes" stretching out to the Earth. Could a plasma glow discharge have been the cause?The "induced magnetotail" that points away from Venus in the direction of the earth is a teardrop-shaped plasma structure filled with “a lot of little stringy things” that was first detected by NASA’s Pioneer Venus Orbiter in the late 1970s. In 1997, Europe’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) Satellite showed that the tail stretched some...

Discovered by the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) spacecraft, the unusual phenomenon is thought to have been caused by the effects of the solar winds and could help to shine more light on how the Martian atmosphere escaped in to space. "We found that Mars' magnetic tail, or magnetotail, is unique in the Solar System," said NASA scientist Gina DiBraccio. "It's not like the magnetotail found at Venus, a planet with no magnetic field of its own, nor is it like Earth's, which is surrounded by its own internally generated magnetic field." "Instead, it is a hybrid between...