The Cold Cosmos

  Dec 1, 2015 Birkeland current interaction is probably the best large-scale structure model for the Universe. A recent article in the astronomical journals and popular press identifies an area of space as a “huge hole” completely empty of matter and energy; “colder” than any other region previously observed. According to…

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Earthquakes and Volcanoes

Volcano and lightning

  Nov 27, 2015 Lightning discharges in the atmosphere are familiar, but what about the ones underground? The electrical phenomenon we call lightning is not well understood. The most common interpretation involves the circulation of water vapor up and down through clouds in a process called convection. Water is heated…

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Pluto ‘Pandemonium’ | Space News

Pluto-various-moons

At a recent NASA news conference, investigators on the New Horizons mission to the dwarf planet Pluto announced some astonishing findings. The moons in the Plutonian system behave in an extremely chaotic manner that planetary scientists admit is both unexpected and inexplicable. The term investigators have used to describe the…

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Star Streams

    Nov 25, 2015 Electrical interpretations are often a better fit. Two dwarf galaxies, known as the Magellanic Clouds, are orbiting the Milky Way and might have once been part of it. Both reside at the beginning of a filamentary structure known as the Magellanic Stream. The Small Magellanic…

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Auroral Arrangement

  Nov 24, 2015 Earth and Jupiter reveal their common connections to the Sun. As previous Picture of the Day articles mention, Earth possesses a complex electrically active structure called a magnetotail (or plasma tail) that extends for millions of kilometers, always pointed away from the Sun. Streams of charged particles…

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