The sun‘s surface and atmosphere are endlessly dynamic, with magnetic lines, plasma, and convection creating a constant churn. In this photo by astrophotographer Eduardo Schaberger Poupeau, a curving question-mark-like filament Keep reading
Tag: plasma
Lagoon Nebula
Some 4,100 light years away in the Sagittarius constellation, a stellar nursery births new stars. Known as Messier 8, or the Lagoon Nebula, this region is one of the most Keep reading
Red Sprites
Sprites, or red sprites, are high-altitude electrical discharges in the atmosphere. Although sometimes called upper-atmospheric lightning, sprites are a cold plasma phenomenon. They often occur in clusters, as in this Keep reading
Solar Coronal Heating
Our Sun‘s visible surface, the photosphere, is about 5800 Kelvin, but the temperature of the wispy corona is far hotter, reaching a million Kelvin in some places. Why the corona Keep reading
“Fusion of Helios”
Built from approximately 90,000 individual images, “Fusion of Helios” reveals the wisp-like corona of our Sun. Astrophotographers Andrew McCarthy and Jason Guenzel joined forces to combine eclipse images with data Keep reading
Escaping the Sun
One enduring mystery of the solar wind — a stream of high-energy particles expelled from the sun — is how the particles get accelerated in the first place. The sun Keep reading
Coronal Heating
Compared to its interior, the surface of our sun is a cool 6,000 degrees Celsius. But beyond the surface, the sun’s corona heats up dramatically through interactions between plasma and Keep reading
“One Month of Sun”
Get lost in the beauty of our star with Seán Doran‘s film “One Month of Sun”. Constructed from more than 78,000 NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory images, the video shows solar Keep reading
Space Hurricanes
Researchers have observed their first “space hurricane” – a 1,000-km-wide vortex of plasma – in Earth’s upper atmosphere. Like conventional hurricanes, this storm featured precipitation (of electrons rather than rain), Keep reading
Jovian Auroras
Like Earth, Jupiter is home to polar auroras that light the sky as charged particles interact with the planet’s magnetosphere. A recent paper identifies interesting features in the aurora that Keep reading