Earth, Saturn, and Jupiter have auroras at their poles, generated by the interaction of their global magnetic fields with the solar wind. Mars has no global magnetic field, only remnants Keep reading
Tag: solar wind
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
A Comet’s Tail Swept Away
On Christmas Day 2021, Comet Leonard put on a show in our skies. Though the comet was a pale streak to the naked eye, photographer Gerald Rhemann caught a striking Keep reading
Brilliant Auroras
Glowing auroras billow across Canada in this satellite image from a recent geomagnetic storm. As our sun enters a more active part of its solar cycle, we can expect more 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
Grayscale Aurora
This swirling grayscale image shows a spring aurora over the Hudson Bay, as seen by the Suomi NPP satellite. As energetic particles from the sun zip past Earth, they interact with our magnetosphere, which Keep reading
Shock Waves in the Solar Wind
The empty space of our solar system is not truly empty, as we’ve discussed previously. For one, there’s a fast-moving flux of charged particles – the solar wind – that Keep reading
Where Does the Sun End?
How do you define the edge of our sun? There’s a distinct surface to it, but our star is also surrounded by the corona, an even hotter region of plasma 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