solar wind tagged posts

The sun is emitting plumes of hydrogen plasma. The white areas are where the sun’s magnetic field is especially strong. Credit: SoHO, a joint project of the European Space Agency and NASA

Surprising observation might reveal what the sun was like when it formed. The sun’s core rotates nearly 4X faster than the sun’s surface, according to new findings by an international team of astronomers. Scientists had assumed the core was rotating like a merry-go-round at about the same speed as the surface. “The most likely explanation is that this core rotation is left over from the period when the sun formed, some 4.6 billion years ago,” said Roger Ulrich, a UCLA professor emeritus of astronomy, who has studied the sun’s interior for more than 40 years...

NASA-funded researchers sent a sounding rocket through the sun’s dense helium wake, called the helium-focusing cone, to understand the origin of certain X-rays in space. (Conceptual graphic not to scale.) Credit: NASA Goddard’s Conceptual Image Lab/Lisa Poje

In the last century, humans realized that space is filled with types of light we can’t see – from infrared signals released by hot stars and galaxies, to the cosmic microwave background that comes from every corner of the universe. Some of this invisible light that fills space takes the form of Xrays, the source of which has been hotly contended over the past few decades.

It wasn’t until the flight of the DXL sounding rocket, short for Diffuse X-ray emission from the Local galaxy, that scientists had concrete answers about the X-ra...

Artistic rendering of Jupiter’s magnetosphere. Credit: JAXA

It is hundreds of times more energetic than Earth’s aurora borealis, finds new UCL-led research using NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory. It is the first time that Jupiter’s X-ray aurora has been studied when a giant storm from the Sun has arrived at the planet. The dramatic findings complement NASA’s Juno mission this summer which aims to understand the relationship between the two biggest structures in the solar system – the region of space controlled by Jupiter’s magnetic field (i.e. its magnetosphere) and that controlled by the solar wind.

“There’s a constant power struggle between the solar wind and Jupiter’s magnetosphere. We want to understand this interaction and what effect it has on the planet...