Space weather forecasting is a guessing game. Predictions of outbursts from the sun are typically based on the amount of activity observed on the sun’s roiling surface, without accounting for the ...

Scientists have detected a strange new type of high-frequency wave on the sun's surface, and the waves are moving three times faster than scientists thought was possible. The acoustic waves, called ...

Australian researchers have played a central role in a landmark result from the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment in South Dakota—the world's most sensitive dark matter detector. Today, scientists working on ...

The outer layers of the sun’s atmosphere are a blistering million degrees hotter than its surface. The hidden culprit? Magnetic activity. How Scientists Are Tackling the Tricky Task of Solar Cycle ...

Seth Putterman started out studying the behavior of plasma for national security reasons. Extremely fast hypersonic missiles heat and ionize the surrounding air and form a cloud of charged particles ...

Groundbreaking advances in solar and space physics have provided key insights into the inner workings of the heliosphere, the vast protective bubble formed by the solar wind that extends from the Sun ...

A paradox that puzzled a generation of solar and atomic physicists – and occasionally pitted theories from one field against the other – has been resolved. The paradox concerns the polarization of ...

Scientists from the University of St Andrews have discovered that ions in solar flares can reach scorching temperatures more than 60 million degrees—6.5 times hotter than previously believed. This ...

Star burst: a solar flare as seen by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. (Courtesy: NASA/SDO) An intense blast of high-energy protons from the Sun pummelled the Earth in about 660 BC and left a ...

At its current solar maximum, our Sun has been pretty busy of late, flinging parts of itself at Earth and raising concerns about effects on satellites and power grids while also gracing us with ...

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are private, nonprofit institutions that provide expert advice on some of the most pressing challenges facing the nation and world. Our ...

Solar physics investigates the complex processes occurring in our Sun – the nearest star and a prototypical example of stellar activity. Central to the discipline is an understanding of the Sun’s ...