Category Astronomy/Space

M.J. Owens, M. Lockwood and L.A. Barnard (2017). ‘Coronal mass ejections are not coherent magnetohydrodynamic structures’. Nature Scientific Reports. Doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-04546-3

Long-term power cuts, destruction of electronic devices and increased cancer risk for aeroplane passengers are all potential effects of the Earth being hit by a powerful solar eruption. Yet, new research has found space scientists have their work cut out to predict when these coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are on a collision course with Earth.

A study of CMEs by scientists at the University of Reading has found they have cloud-like structures...

NASA-funded CHESS mission will check out the space between stars Floating clouds of the interstellar medium are the focus of the NASA-funded CHESS sounding rocket mission, which will check out the earliest stages of star formation. Here, the CHESS payload is integrated with the sounding rocket before launch. Credit: Kevin France

Deep in space between distant stars, space is not empty. Instead, there drifts vast clouds of neutral atoms and molecules, as well as charged plasma particles called the interstellar medium—that may, over millions of years, evolve into new stars and even planets. These floating interstellar reservoirs are the focus of the NASA-funded CHESS sounding rocket mission, which will check out the earliest stages of star formation.

CHESS—short for the Colorado High-resolu...

A model of the crystal structure of cristobalite X-I, which had never before been discovered in other materials. This high-pressure phase of cristobalite is made up of two layers (green and blue), each composed of Si?O. Credit: Leonid Dubrovinsky

A research group at the University of Bayreuth has found a long-sought explanation for the apparent contradictions implicit in the composition of lunar and Martian meteorites. In cooperation with the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble and research partners in Lyon and Vienna, the Bayreuth scientists led by Prof. Dubrovinsky were able to demonstrate how meteorites could contain within narrow spaces minerals whose formation conditions are quite different.

When asteroids or co...

The annihilation rates have a signature non-monotonic velocity dependence over and above the resonances, e.g., for DM mass larger than 4 TeV the galactic annihilation rate (solid line) exceeds that in clusters (dashed line) and dwarf galaxies (dot- dashed line).
Credit: Anirban Das, Basudeb Dasgupta

A new theory predicts how dark matter may be annihilating much more rapidly in the Milky Way, than in smaller or larger galaxies and the early Universe. Anirban Das, with his advisor Dr. Basudeb Dasgupta, pursued this possibility because almost all observations made so far indicate no signals of dark matter annihilation anywhere – except the tantalizing signals from the Milky Way seen by the PAMELA and AMS02 detector and the Fermi gamma ray telescope...