Subsonic turbulence – like the random and chaotic motions of air and water in our everyday lives – is something we have only a limited understanding of. Our knowledge of Keep reading
Tag: astronomy
Simulating Solar Flares
Few topics in fluid dynamics are more mathematically complicated than magnetohydrodynamics – the marriage between electromagnetism and fluids. That mathematical complexity, along with the vast range of scales necessary to Keep reading
Exploding Meteors
During the recent Perseid shower, photographer Petr Horálek caught an awesome timelapse of an exploding meteor and the vortex ring it created. This is a type of persistent train left when meteors Keep reading
Bringing the Stars Home
One of my favorite aspects of fluid dynamics is the way that the same patterns and phenomena appear over and over again – sometimes in the most unexpected places. That’s Keep reading
Solar Eclipses and Coronal Mass Ejections
Observations of many solar phenomena have only become accessible to humans relatively recently with the advent of satellites. Prior to that, it simply wasn’t feasible to observe dynamics in the Keep reading
Stellar Bow Shock
This Hubble image shows a young star in the Orion Nebula and the curved bow shock arcing around it. Despite its age, the star LL Orionis is energetic, producing a Keep reading
Turbulence in the Solar Wind
One of the key features of turbulent flows is that they contain many different length scales. Look at the plume from an erupting volcano, and you’ll see eddies that are Keep reading
The Bubble Nebula
This spectacular Hubble image shows the Bubble Nebula. The source of this nebula is the star seen toward the upper left side of the bubble. This massive, super-hot star has Keep reading
5 Years of SDO
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) is our premiere source for data on the sun. In honor of its five-year anniversary, NASA released this beautiful video compiling some of the highlights Keep reading
Turbulence and Star Formation
Galaxy clusters are objects containing hundreds or thousands of galaxies immersed in hot gas. This gas glows brightly in X-ray, as seen in the Perseus (top) and Virgo (bottom) clusters Keep reading