Category Astronomy/Space

New research undertaken at Northumbria University, Newcastle shows that the Sun’s magnetic waves behave differently than currently believed. After examining data gathered over a 10-year period, the team from Northumbria’s Department of Mathematics, Physics and Electrical Engineering found that magnetic waves in the Sun’s corona – its outermost layer of atmosphere – react to sound waves escaping from the inside of the Sun.

These magnetic waves, known as Alfvénic waves, play a crucial role in transporting energy around the Sun and the solar system...

During its routine yearly monitoring of the weather on our solar system’s outer planets, Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a new mysterious dark storm on Neptune and provided a fresh look at a long-lived storm circling around the north polar region on Uranus. Like Earth, Uranus and Neptune have seasons, which likely drive some of the features in their atmospheres...

This dazzling region of newly forming stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) was captured by the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer instrument (MUSE) on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The relatively small amount of dust in the LMC and MUSE’s acute vision allowed intricate details of the region to be picked out in visible light...

The Milky Way galaxy’s disk of stars is anything but stable and flat. Instead, it becomes increasingly warped and twisted far away from the Milky Way’s center, according to astronomers from National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC).

From a great distance, the galaxy would look like a thin disk of stars that orbit once every few hundred million years around its central region, where hundreds of billions of stars, together with a huge mass of dark matter, provide the gravitational ‘glue’ to hold it all together.

But the pull of gravity becomes weaker far away from the Milky Way’s inner regions...