As material collapses onto a protostar, these young stars often form stellar jets that point outward along their axis of rotation. Made up of plasma, these jets shoot into the Keep reading
Tag: plasma
The Best of FYFD 2024
Welcome to another year and another look back at FYFD’s most popular posts. (You can find previous editions, too, for 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and Keep reading
Eerie Aurora
This surreal image comes from an aurora on Halloween 2013. Photographer Ole C. Salomonsen captured it in Norway during one of the best auroral displays that year. The shimmering green Keep reading
A Plasma Arc Lights
Plasma lighters — as their name indicates — use plasma in place of burning butane. Plasma — our universe’s most common state of matter — is a gas that’s been Keep reading
More Gigantic Jets
It’s wild that we’re still discovering new weather phenomena, but the gigantic jets seen here were only identified in 2002. This uncommon type of lightning shoots up from the tops Keep reading
A Triangular Prominence
Our Sun is a maelstrom of light and heat, a constant battlefield for plasma and magnetic fields. This recent prominence, captured by Andrea Vanoni and others, bore a striking triangular Keep reading
Gigantic Jets
Stormy skies feature much more than the forked cloud-to-ground lightning we’re used to seeing. This composite image shows a rare and recently-recognized type of lightning known as a gigantic jets. Keep reading
The Solar Corona in Detail
The sun’s corona — its outer atmosphere — is usually impossible to see, since it’s far outshone by the rest of the sun. But during a total solar eclipse, the Keep reading
Solar Filament Eruption
From Earth, we rarely glimpse the violent flows of our home star. Here, a filament erupts from the photosphere creating a coronal mass ejection, captured in ultraviolet wavelengths by the Keep reading
The Solar Corona in Stunning Detail
The ESA’s Solar Orbiter captured this beautifully detailed video of our sun‘s corona last September. The Solar Orbiter took this footage from about 43 million kilometers away, a third of Keep reading