radiation tagged posts

Shielding astronauts from the deadly radiation they face is a central challenge for any designer of a deep-space crewed mission. Even relatively low levels of exposure over long periods can lead to everything from central nervous system damage to cancer. But current solutions, such as passive water shells or active superconducting magnets, have their own limitations. To get around those, a new paper, available in preprint on arXiv by Valerio Parisi and a team of researchers from Italy and Germany, looks at the feasibility of using a permanent magnet (and its associated permanent magnetic field) to potentially block some of that radiation without the costs of competing technologies.

First, let’s l...

Deep beneath the surface of distant exoplanets known as super-Earths, oceans of molten rock may be doing something extraordinary: powering magnetic fields strong enough to shield entire planets from dangerous cosmic radiation and other harmful high-energy particles.

Earth’s magnetic field is generated by movement in its liquid iron outer core—a process known as a dynamo—but larger rocky worlds like super-Earths might have solid or fully liquid cores that cannot produce magnetic fields in the sam...

Stars like the sun are remarkably constant. They vary in brightness by only 0.1% over years and decades, thanks to the fusion of hydrogen into helium that powers them. This process will keep the sun shining steadily for about 5 billion more years, but when stars exhaust their nuclear fuel, their deaths can lead to pyrotechnics.

The sun will eventually die by growing large and then condensing into a type of star called a white dwarf. But stars more than eight times more massive than the sun die violently in an explosion called a supernova.

Supernovae happen across the Milky Way only a few times a century, and these violent explosions are usually remote enough that people here on Earth don’t n...

Black holes are regions of space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape. New research is examining the radiation and winds emanating from black hole activity and shows how they may exert effects on nearby planets.

“The impact of AGN outflows on the surface habitability of terrestrial planets in the Milky Way” is a research paper by the team of astrobiologist Manasvi Lingam and astrophysicist Eric Perlman from Florida Tech’s Department of Aerospace, Physics and Space Sciences, as well as researchers from the University of Rome, University of Maryland and Goddard Space Flight Center...