March 24, 2020 Electrons and positrons are formed in lightning bolts. Lightning is a plasma that creates powerful electromagnetic pulses across a wide range of frequencies. Thunderheads may be several thousand cubic kilometers in extent, yet all of that stored electrical energy travels down a discharge channel no wider than…
March 23, 2020 The Sun does not power itself. “Yeah we all shine on, like the moon, and the stars, and the Sun.”— John Lennon The Solar Dynamics Observatory was launched from Cape Canaveral on February 11, 2010. SDO’s mission is to observe the Sun in a variety of wavelengths,…
March 20, 2020 Galaxies are electrical entities. A recent press release reiterates the current maxim among astronomers and astrophysicists: “About eighty-five percent of the matter in the universe is in the form of dark matter…” Dark matter is the topic of several Pictures of the Day. It is undetectable by…
March 19, 2020 “Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself.”— Erasmus Previous Picture of the day articles take issue with the theory of dark matter. Astronomers think that an undetectable kind of matter must exist in space, because stars on the edges of spiral galaxies revolve with the…
March 18, 2020 Frozen water on Mercury? NASA launched the BepiColombo mission on October 20, 2018. The mission consists of two satellites: the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO). MPO is designed to study Mercury’s composition, while MMO will study Mercury’s magnetosphere. One of BepiColumbo’s tasks…
March 17, 2020 X-rays from galactic cores are accelerated by electric fields. Rather than accepting electric fields as a source, astronomers prefer to think of “strong winds blowing” out of the galaxy’s core. Often called “Ultra-Luminous X-ray sources” (ULX), they are points across the sky more powerful than a million…
March 16, 2020 The Sun’s activity is almost impossible to model, because of its variability. A recently published animation illustrates the Sun’s electromagnetic field as it twists and folds through its ionized plasma. The “Sun in a bottle” was created in order to understand how an apparently chaotic solar environment…
March 13, 2020 Dwarf planets are a puzzle. In 1997, astronomers Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter studied Type 1a supernovae, because their variable rise in luminosity and subsequent decline are considered predictable. That measurement is a way for consensus researchers to determine a supernova’s true brightness or “absolute magnitude“. Calculating…
March 12, 2020 The moons of Mars are scarred worlds. The two moons of Mars are called Phobos and Deimos, meaning “fear and “panic”. Phobos is extensively studied by Earth-based telescopes and by satellites in Mars orbit. Deimos, however, is so small that major observations are impossible from Earth. Stickney…
March 11, 2020 What causes gigantic blobs of hydrogen to glow? Over ten years ago, Chinese astronomers from Purple Mountain Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, saw what was later called a “Lyman-alpha blob” (LAB). They recognized that there was something unusual about the observation, because of the gas cloud’s mass….
