magnetic field tagged posts

Physicists led by the University of Iowa have learned how a type of aurora on Mars is formed.

In a new study, the physicists studied discrete aurora, a light-in-the-sky display that occurs mostly during the night in the red planet’s southern hemisphere. While scientists have known about discrete aurora on Mars-which also occur on Earth – they did not know how they formed...

New research lends credence to an unorthodox retelling of the story of early Earth first proposed by a geophysicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

In a study appearing March 15 in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Scripps Oceanography researchers Dave Stegman, Leah Ziegler, and Nicolas Blanc provide new estimates for the thermodynamics of magnetic field generation within the liquid portion of the early Earth’s mantle and show how long that field was available.

The paper provides a “door-opening opportunity” to resolve inconsistencies in the narrative of the planet’s early days...

New papers summarize the lander’s findings above and below the surface of the Red Planet. A new understanding of Mars is beginning to emerge, thanks to the first year of NASA’s InSight lander mission. Findings described in a set of six papers published today reveal a planet alive with quakes, dust devils and strange magnetic pulses.

Five of the papers were published in Nature Geoscience. An additional paper in Nature Communications details the InSight spacecraft’s landing site, a shallow crater nicknamed “Homestead hollow” in a region called Elysium Planitia.

InSight is the first mission dedicate...

A precession driven flow is supposed to power magnetic field self-excitation in a planned liquid metal dynamo experiment at HZDR. Credit: HZDR

Precession sufficient to generate a magnetic field. Flows of molten metal can generate magnetic fields. This dynamo effect creates cosmic magnetic fields, like those found on planets, moons and even asteroids. Over the coming years, a globally unique experiment, in which a steel drum containing several tons of liquid sodium rotates around two axes, is intended to demonstrate this effect. It will be carried out in the new DRESDYN facility at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), an independent German research laboratory.

Similarly to how a bicycle dynamo converts motion into electricity, moving conductive fluids can generate magnetic field...