The Sun’s magnetic field, which is embedded in the solar wind, permeates the entire solar system. The current sheet — where the magnetic field changes polarity —spirals out from near the solar equator like a wavy skirt around a ballet dancer’s waist.
Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Combined observations of Comet McNaught – one of the brightest comets visible from Earth in the past 50 years – have revealed new insights on the nature of comets and their relationship with the Sun. Engineers and scientists gathered around a screen in an operations room at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., eager to lay their eyes on the first data from NASA’s STEREO spacecraft...

Longer lactation duration is associated with decreased prevalence of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in women. Journal of Hepatology, 2018; DOI: 10.1016/j.jhep.2018.09.013

Study finds fatty liver disease is less likely to occur in mothers who breastfeed for more than six months. Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and Kaiser Permanente have discovered that mothers who breastfed a child or children for six months or more are at lower risk for developing non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) years later during mid-life. With no other current prevention options aside from a healthy lifestyle, they say the finding may represent an early modifiable risk factor for a serious and chronic disease.

The findings are published in the November 1 issue of the Jour...

Shockwave of Supernova 1987A as it slammed into debris that ringed the original star before its demise. Credit: Yvette Cendes, Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Toronto

Astronomers have observed the aftermath of Supernova 1987A over a 25-year period, from 1992 to 2017. Since it first appeared in the southern night sky on February 24th 1987, Supernova 1987A has been one of the most studied objects in the history of astronomy.

The supernova was the cataclysmic death of a blue supergiant star, some 168,000 light-years from Earth, in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way Galaxy. It was the brightest supernova to appear in our skies since Kepler’s Supernova in 1604 and the first since the invention of the telescope.

The brilliant new star...