Asymmetric space waves map pressure on Earth's magnetic shield

The Earth’s magnetic field is responsible for shielding us from harmful space weather, including solar radiation from the Sun but also cosmic rays originating from outside our solar system. Cosmic rays can include deep space supernovas, so the magnetic field takes the majority of the brunt from solar radiation. Without our magnetic field, the solar wind would slowly strip away our atmosphere, making life on our small, blue world impossible to exist. But where is the magnetic field doing the heaviest lifting regarding how it filters out incoming space radiation?

A Brief-ish History of METI. Part I: Early Ideas and Experiments

For as long as scientists have conducted SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) experiments, parallel efforts in Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) have also been mounted. In this series, we'll take a look at the major milestones in this field of study.

Scientists Can Now Spot Hidden Sunspots on the Solar Far Side

Unlike the Moon, the Sun is constantly rotating from our perspective - but we still only see half of it at any given time. Since it takes 27 days to complete a full rotation, that leaves plenty of time for changes to happen to the side we can’t see that could directly impact Earth’s own space weather a few weeks later. Now a team of physicists led by Bibhuti Kumar Jha of the Southwest Research Institute has published a paper in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series that uses probability to map out what might be happening on the far side of the Sun, even if we can’t see it directly.

A Merger Solves a Puzzling Paradox in Orion

Some of the Hubble Space Telescope's earliest observations were of the Orion Nebula. Those images showed proplyds, and subsequent observations uncovered a paradox centered on them. Given their rate of mass loss, those disks should have been destroyed long ago. Why weren't they?

Rare Lunar Meteorites Could Fill Gaps In Moon’s Evolution

Almost all meteorites come from asteroids, not the Moon or Mars. But after decades of analysis of the Apollo samples, researchers still rely on lunar meteorites to better understand our anomalously large Moon.

White Dwarfs Are Actually…Yellow, Green, Pink, and Purple?

The universe hosts a myriad of star types, including supergiants, giants, main sequence, red dwarfs, brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, and neutron stars. What makes these stars stand out are just their sizes, but their colors, as each one hosts a distinct color based on their surface temperature, specifically orange, red, blue, and white based on cooler to hotter temperatures. While the correlation between star colors and surface temperatures has long been known throughout astronomy, what if star colors could change based on specific criteria, including their atmosphere?

27 Exoplanet Targets for the World's First Private Space Telescope

Get ready for the age of private space telescopes. The Lazuli Space Telescope will launch in a few years and part of its mission is to observe exoplanets. New research presents a list of 27 exoplanet targets, some of which are very well-known and will certainly benefit from deeper observations.