magnetic fields tagged posts

In a first for white dwarfs, the burnt-out cores of dead stars, astronomers have discovered that at least one member of this cosmic family is two faced. One side of the white dwarf is composed of hydrogen, while the other is made up of helium.

“The surface of the white dwarf completely changes from one side to the other,” says Ilaria Caiazzo, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech who leads a new study on the findings in the journal Nature. “When I show the observations to people, they are blown away.”

White dwarfs are the scalding remains of stars that were once like our sun. As the stars age, they puff up into red giants; eventually, their outer fluffy material is blown away and their cores contract into dense, fiery-hot white dwarfs...

Located near the summit of Maunakea, Hawaii, the 15-meter (~49 ft) James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) at the East Asia Observatory (EAO) is the largest telescope in the world designed to operate exclusively in the submillimeter-wavelength. In 2018, Molokai’i High School alumna Mallory Go was awarded time with the JCMT under the Maunakea Scholars program. With the assistance of EAO astronomer Dr...

Earth’s magnetic field does more than keep everyone’s compass needles pointed in the same direction. It also helps preserve Earth’s sliver of life-sustaining atmosphere by deflecting high energy particles and plasma regularly blasted out of the sun...

Radio telescope images enable a new way to study magnetic fields in galaxy clusters millions of light years away. For the first time, researchers have observed plasma jets interacting with magnetic fields in a massive galaxy cluster 600 million light years away, thanks to the help of radio telescopes and supercomputer simulations. The findings, published in the journal Nature, can help clarify how such galaxy clusters evolve.

Galaxy clusters can contain up to thousands of galaxies bound to...