NASA’s TRACERS (Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites) mission has gathered its first clues to how space weather affects Earth’s magnetic field. In a new paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, researchers break down how these interactions work after analyzing initial observations from the first year of the mission.

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When we think of extraterrestrial intelligence that might be out there among the stars, we tend to think of creatures not too unlike us, though maybe with gray skin, probably bald and with big black eyes. We focus on the familiar, humanoids. But there are many intelligent species on Earth that are nonhumanoid: dolphins, crows, […]

Most of us could spend our entire lives looking at the night sky and see very few changes. The moon becomes more or less illuminated, the planets drift placidly through the sky, satellites and the ISS intrude for a few moments at a time, and the bright, momentary streak of a meteor punctuates the occasional […]

When asteroids travel too close to white dwarfs, the dense remnants of stars that have exhausted their nuclear fuel, powerful gravitational forces can tear them apart. However, new research from Planetary Science Institute (PSI) suggests that these asteroids don’t immediately break into dust. Instead, most of the mass initially remains in larger fragments, revealing a […]

A new study lets some of the air out of a long-held theory that growing, rocky planets will lose their atmosphere if they smash into a large object in space.

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The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is a faint glow in the universe dating back to roughly 380,000 years after the Big Bang, long before stars or galaxies emerged. Detecting this light and mapping its fluctuations provide valuable insights into the age and composition of the universe.

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Magnetic fields exist in many stars, including the sun. Yet they remain too poorly understood to be reliably included in stellar evolution models, limiting their accuracy. Now, a new study by researchers at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, shows why a star’s “criminal” evolutionary history may be […]

A cosmic explosion that announced itself with a modest flash of gamma rays went on to produce one of the brightest afterglows astronomers have recorded in the past 20 years. An international team of astronomers now finds evidence that the surprising mismatch comes down to perspective: Earth was outside the most intensely beamed light from […]