An international team of astronomers has performed radio observations of a star-forming galaxy known as NGC 4217. The observational campaign detected a large radio bubble in the galaxy’s halo. The finding was reported in a paper published September 23 on the pre-print server arXiv.
The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, the world’s most powerful solar telescope, designed, built, and operated by the NSF National Solar Observatory (NSO), achieved a major breakthrough in solar physics by directly mapping the strength of the magnetic field in the solar corona, the outer part of the solar atmosphere that can be seen during a total eclipse. This breakthrough promises to enhance our understanding of space weather and its impact on Earth’s technology-dependent society.
The corona: the launch pad of space weather.
The Sun’s magnetic field generates regions in the Sun’s atmosphere, often rooted by sunspots, that store vast amounts of energy that fuel explosive solar storms and drive space weather. The corona, the Sun’s outer atmosphere, is a superheated realm where these magnetic mysteries unfold. Mapping coronal magnetic fields is essential to understanding and predicting space weather — and to protect our technology in Earth and space.
Solar storms, characterized by sudden explosions of particles, energy, and magnetic fields from the Sun, can create disruptions in Earth’s magnetosphere. As told to NDTV, Dr. Annapurni Subramanian, Director of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, stated, “The (solar) flare which occurred a few days ago is similar in terms of strength to the one which occurred in May.” These flares are known to produce geomagnetic storms that can result in radio blackouts and power outages on Earth.
Recent NDTV reports highlight a series of powerful solar flares emitted by the Sun, including an X7.1 flare on October 1 and an even stronger X9.0 flare on October 3. NASA captured these flares using its Solar Dynamics Observatory, emphasizing their potential to disrupt communication systems. NOAA classified the X9.0 flare as an R3-strength flare, indicating a “strong” potential for radio blackouts.
The team spotted the record-breaking triple star system because of strobing starlight caused by the stars crossing in front of each other, as seen from our position on Earth.
The team turned to machine learning to analyze vast amounts of data from TESS to spot a pattern indicating these eclipses. They then called upon the aid of citizen scientists to further filter this data to spot interesting signals.
“We’re mainly looking for signatures of compact multi-star systems, unusual pulsating stars in binary systems, and weird objects,” Rappaport said. “It’s exciting to identify a system like this because they’re rarely found, but they may be more common than current tallies suggest.”
Researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi have revealed that our galaxy, part of the Laniākea supercluster, might actually reside within a significantly larger cosmic structure, potentially centered around the massive Shapley concentration.
This discovery, emerging from the study of 56,000 galaxies, suggests that our cosmic neighborhood could be 10 times larger than previously estimated, challenging existing models of the universe’s structure.
An international research team guided by astronomers at the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy is challenging our understanding of the universe with groundbreaking findings that suggest our cosmic neighborhood may be far larger than previously thought. The Cosmicflows team has been studying the trajectories of 56,000 galaxies, revealing a potential shift in the scale of our galactic basin of attraction.
The Parker Solar Probe has matched its own speed and distance records in a recent close encounter with the Sun and is preparing for an even closer approach aided by a Venus flyby.
On September 30, NASAs Parker Solar Probe completed its 21st close approach to the Sun, equaling its own distance record by coming within about 4.51 million miles (7.26 million kilometers) of the solar surface.
The close approach (known as perihelion) occurred at 5:15 UTC — or 12:15 a.m. EDT — with Parker Solar Probe moving 394,700 miles per hour (635,300 kilometers per hour) around the Sun, again matching its own record. The spacecraft checked in on October 3 with mission operators at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland — where the spacecraft was also designed and built — with a beacon tone indicating it was in good health and all systems were operating normally.
For the first time, scientists have taken near-daily measurements of the sun’s global coronal magnetic field, a region of the sun that has only been observed irregularly in the past. The resulting observations are providing valuable insights into the processes that drive the intense solar storms that impact fundamental technologies, and thus lives and livelihoods, here on Earth.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have revealed new details about Earth’s core-mantle boundary and similar regions found in exoplanets.
As BepiColombo sped past Mercury during its June 2023 flyby, it encountered a variety of features in the tiny planet’s magnetic field. These measurements provide a tantalizing taste of the mysteries that the mission is set to investigate when it arrives in orbit around the solar system’s innermost planet.
By adding primordial magnetic fields to the Standard Model, researchers may solve the mystery of the Universe’s expansion.
Scientists have suggested a way to resolve a longstanding paradox known as the Hubble tension by taking primordial magnetic fields into account, which may have been generated in the early moments of the Universe.
“Primordial magnetic fields are the fields generated in the early Universe, such as during inflation, phase transitions, and other processes,” explained Yaoyu Li, a physicist at the Purple Mountain Observatory in China and one of the authors of the study. “These magnetic fields might evolve with the expansion of the Universe, be amplified and subsequently become galactic magnetic fields that we observe today.”
