November 13, 2025
People across the United States weren’t the only ones treated to a spectacular celestial show. This week’s intense geomagnetic storm illuminated the night sky around the world. Check out some of the most stunning displays from Europe to Mongolia to Australia.
(July 19, 2024)
The current solar cycle, named Cycle 25 because it is the 25th since 1755 when extensive recording of solar sunspot activity began, started in 2019.
It is not expected to end for another six years but the first signs that the next solar cycle is beginning have been spotted by researchers from the University of Birmingham and presented at the Royal Astronomical Society‘s National Astronomy Meeting in Hull.
(July 23, 2024)
Solar max affects activity on the sun’s surface. Sunspots, flares and coronal mass ejections are all more rampant at solar maximum. This leads to a surge in electromagnetic energy hurtling toward Earth, making auroras visible more often and at lower altitudes.
The current solar cycle – Cycle 25 – started in 2019. It has the name Cycle 25 because it’s the 25th since 1755, when extensive recording of solar sunspot activity began.
It is not expected to end for another six years, but researchers have spotted the first signs that the next solar cycle is beginning. Researchers from the University of Birmingham presented their findings at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Hull on July 18, 2024.
(June 10, 2024)
Evidence of a long-ago collision involving the Earth was there in the form of specific radioactive isotopes deposited across the Earth and Moon. There were, however, skeptics.
But now researchers have tracked the sun’s path through the Milky Way back to a crash 2 to 3 million years ago with a dense interstellar cloud. The event was so violent it appears to have collapsed the sun’s protective bubble around the solar system and possibly even affected life on Earth.
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“We don’t often discuss the impact of astrophysics on Earth because the astronomical timescales are very long, and the human species emerged on Earth just a few million years ago,” Loeb said. “But a few million years ago there was the potential for us to be passing through a very dense cloud. We didn’t work out the biological implications, but it’s clear that if you shrink the heliosphere to within the orbit of the Earth around the sun, we are not protected anymore. It could have significant implications for life on Earth.”
(May 2025)
Solar Cycle 24, the weakest in over a century, exhibited significant deviations from previous cycles, beginning with a prolonged minimum, weak polar fields, and asynchronous polar field reversal, leading to hemispheric asymmetry. Sunspot activity declined by approximately 30% compared to Cycle 23, while the overall occurrence rate of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) decreased, although some studies suggest that the rate of halo CMEs relative to total CMEs may have remained relatively stable. This study investigates the impact of weaker solar activity on geomagnetic storm dynamics by analyzing CME properties, solar wind conditions, and their influence on magnetospheric energy transfer. Key findings indicate that a lower heliospheric pressure in Cycle 24 caused CMEs to expand more than in Cycle 23, altering energy transfer to Earth‘s magnetosphere.
(July 24, 2013)
The Sun is acting weird. It typically puts on a pageant of magnetic activity every 11 years for aurora watchers and sungazers alike, but this time it overslept. When it finally woke up (a year late), it gave the weakest performance in 100 years.
What’s even weirder is that scientists, who aren’t usually shy about tossing hypotheses about, are at a loss for a good explanation.
(December 2009)
Abstract. The heliosphere is the space within which the solar wind dominates and the solar interplanetary magnetic field prevails. Its boundary is determined by the balance between stellar and solar winds. Owing to the present reduction in the solar wind pressure, one would expect that the stellar wind would push the heliosphere inward leading to its shrinkage. In this paper we calculate the extent of the heliosphere at different solar wind status. Backward estimation of the extent of the heliosphere since 1890 is done. It is found that the heliosphere oscillated between 75 and 125 AU between 1890 – 2010. Most important is the forecast of the shrinkage and oscillations of the heliosphere and their implications on the earth. The shrinkage of the heliosphere would allow more invasions of cosmic rays to the earth and planets, increased cloud cover and a cooler Earth.
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1.4 Prediction of the State of solar Activity During The Next Few Decades
Weak solar cycles occur at the bottom of Wolf-Gleissberg cycles. They tend to occur in series of 3-4 cycles. A single weak cycle also occurs in between the two maximums of Wolf-Gleissberg cycle. Since the last weak solar cycles occurred around 1900 while the previous ones occurred around 1800 then the newly started cycle 24 should be a weak solar cycle. However, owing to the 200-years de Verie cycle of the sun, it is more likely that the status of the coming solar activity would be something like those weak cycles around 1800 as shown in Fig 1. Svalgaard (2005) also predicted that cycle 24 would be the lowest so far in the past 100 years with the maximum sunspot number around 75.
Jun 11, 2020
Far, far beyond the orbits of the planets lie the hazy outlines of the magnetic bubble in space that we call home.
This is the heliosphere, the vast bubble that is generated by the Sun’s magnetic field and envelops all the planets. The borders of this cosmic bubble are not fixed. In response to the Sun’s gasps and sighs, they shrink and stretch over the years.
Now, for the first time, scientists have used an entire solar cycle of data from NASA’s IBEX spacecraft to study how the heliosphere changes over time. Solar cycles last roughly 11 years, as the Sun swings from seasons of high to low activity, and back to high again. With IBEX’s long record, scientists were eager to examine how the Sun’s mood swings play out at the edge of the heliosphere. The results show the shifting outer heliosphere in great detail, deftly sketch the heliosphere’s shape — a matter of debate in recent years, and hint at processes behind one of its most puzzling features. These findings, along with a newly fine-tuned data set, are published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplements on June 10, 2020.
(November 6, 2025)
According to NASA, Voyager 1 has now encountered what researchers describe as a “wall of fire,” a zone where temperatures reach between 30,000 and 50,000 kelvin — roughly 30,000 degrees Celsius. The finding was made as part of ongoing efforts to understand the boundary separating our Solar System from interstellar space.
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“An observation made by Voyager 2 confirms a surprising result from Voyager 1: the magnetic field in the region just beyond the heliopause is parallel to the magnetic field inside the heliosphere,” NASA noted. With data from both spacecraft, scientists can now confirm that this alignment is not a coincidence but a defining characteristic of the boundary region.
628,218 views Aug 31, 2017
This visualization tracks the trajectory of the Voyager 1 spacecraft through the solar system. Launched on September 5, 1977, it was one of two spacecraft sent to visit the giant planets of the outer solar system. Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter and Saturn before being directed out of the solar system.
To fit the 40 year history of the mission into a short visualization, the pacing of time accelerates through most of the movie, starting at about 5 days per second at the beginning and speeding up to about 11 months per second after the planet flybys are past.
The termination shock and heliopause are the ‚boundaries‘ created when the plasma between the stars interacts with the plasma flowing outward from the Sun.
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 has been cruising through space for nearly 47 years, traveling a mind-boggling distance of almost 16 billion miles from Earth. This journey has already broken records—it was the first spacecraft to cross the heliopause, the boundary where the Sun’s solar wind yields to interstellar space. Now, it is on course to reach a distance known as a light-day, meaning the distance that light travels in 24 hours.
Traveling at about 38,000 miles per hour, Voyager 1’s progress may seem slow compared to light speed, but it reveals the vast scales of cosmic distance. Radio signals sent from the spacecraft take nearly 23 hours to reach Earth, which offers a glimpse into the immense challenges of communicating across these astronomical expanses.
(August 2008)
Correlations between geomagnetic-field and climate parameters have been suggested repeatedly, but possible links are controversially discussed. Here we test if weak (Earth-strength) magnetic fields can affect climatically relevant properties of seawater. We found the solubility of air in seawater to be by 15% lower under reduced magneticfield (20 mT) compared to normal field conditions (50 mT). The magnetic-field effect on CO2 solubility is twice as large, from which we surmise that geomagnetic field variations modulate the carbon exchange between atmosphere and ocean. A 1% reduction in magnetic dipole moment may release up to ten times more CO2 from the surface ocean than is emitted by subaerial volcanism.
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The fact that the MF effect is similar among the molecular gases suggests that effects seen with air are not due to the paramagnetic susceptibility of O 2, which is too small to explain the observed magnetic-field effects in terms of magnetization effects.
(June 13, 2025)
The strength of Earth’s magnetic field seems to rise and fall in line with the abundance of oxygen in the planet’s atmosphere, a study of geological records spanning the past half a billion years has found.
(June 13, 2025)
We search for possible observational evidence for such a relationship by examining evolutions of the virtual geomagnetic axial dipole moment and the atmospheric oxygen level over the past 540 million years. We find that both exhibit strong linearly increasing trends, coupled with a large surge in magnitude between 330 and 220 million years ago.
(June 18, 2025)
Data for both Earth’s magnetic field and oxygen extend over comparable ranges in databases that myriad geophysicists and geochemists have compiled. Until now, the authors of the new study say, no scientists had made a detailed comparison of the records.
(November 10, 2025)
The observations by the European Space Agency’s Swarm trio of satellites found that Earth’s already weak magnetic field over the South Atlantic Ocean—a region known as the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA)—is getting worse and that it has grown by an area half the size of continental Europe since 2014. At the same time, a region over Canada where the field is particularly strong has shrunk, while another strong field region in Siberia has grown, the measurements show.
(July 29, 2025)
1. The Magnetic Field’s Essential Role
Earth’s magnetic field acts as a protective barrier against the relentless bombardment of solar wind and cosmic rays. Without this shield, high-energy particles from the Sun would strip away our atmosphere, exposing living organisms to dangerous radiation.
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12. Atmospheric and Climate Connections
Researchers are investigating whether a weaker magnetic field could alter Earth’s atmosphere or climate.
(August 19, 2025)
In addition to the WMM2025, the release includes the first-ever World Magnetic Model High Resolution (WMMHR), which features a spatial resolution of approximately 300 km at the equator, an improvement upon the standard spatial resolution of 3,300 km at the equator. Higher resolution provides greater directional accuracy, making this a significant improvement for users.
In addition to the introduction of the WMMHR, this release comes with some other key changes:
– The WMM predicts an intensification of the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) between 2025 and 2030.
– The WMM uncertainty analysis presented in the report has been updated with new data, resulting in a slightly revised error budget.
– The WMM report provides altitude ranges for varying levels of geomagnetic activity.
(December 25, 2024)
2 versions of the model are:
WMM2025: Standard model with a spatial resolution of 3 300 km (2 050 miles) at the equator.
WMMHR2025: A high-resolution model with an improved spatial resolution of approximately 300 km (186 miles), offering enhanced directional accuracy.
“We’re delighted to join with NOAA and BGS to publish WMM2025 and WMMHR2025, and we encourage users, where possible, to transition to the higher resolution model,” Mike Paniccia, a geodetic Earth scientist and the program manager for the World Magnetic Model (WMM) at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), stated.
(May 20, 2020)
Over the last 200 years, the magnetic field has lost around 9% of its strength on a global average. A large region of reduced magnetic intensity has developed between Africa and South America and is known as the South Atlantic Anomaly.
The northern lights lit up the night sky across America on Tuesday, dazzling stargazers from New Hampshire to the heartland with eerie green and orange streaks of cosmic fire.
The Aurora Borealis was spotted in a large swath of states, including Idaho, Iowa, Missouri, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Washington state. Northern lights were visible as far south as parts of Florida and Alabama, a relatively rare occurrence that highlights the severity of this week‘s storms.
A surge in solar activity fueled the vibrant display as the sun reached the peak of its 11-year solar cycle, a period marked by a sharp increase in sunspots and geomagnetic storms.
Around 2019–2020, the sun was at its quietest point; however, with more frequent bursts of solar wind erupting from those sunspots, Earth is now experiencing more substantial and more frequent auroral events.
Etwas Besonderes sind die Polarlichter in Süddeutschland auch, weil sie kein häufiges Phänomen sind. Skandinavien ist für die Sonnenstürme bekannt. „Tatsächlich ist Polarlicht in Süddeutschland schon sehr, sehr selten“, sagt Liefke.
(October 8, 2025)
U.S. chemist Omar Yaghi, who on Wednesday became the first Palestinian scientist to win a Nobel Prize, reached the pinnacle of his profession after “quite a journey,” he said in remarks posted to X from the official Nobel account, recorded just after he learned the news.
He was born into a family of refugees, he told the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awarded him the Nobel Prize in chemistry for groundbreaking work in molecular architecture, along with collaborators Susumu Kitagawa and Richard Robson. “My parents could barely read or write,” he said.
MANILA, Philippines — The province of Cebu has been placed under a state of calamity following the damage caused by a magnitude 6.9 earthquake on Tuesday night.
As of 9 p.m. yesterday, the Office of Civil Defense (OCD) said the number of fatalities climbed to 69.
The Cebu Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office pegged the injured at 293.
Bogo City accounts for most of the deaths with 30 people, followed by the municipalities of San Remigio with 22, Medellin with 10, Tabogon with five and Tabuelan and Sogod with one reported death each.
The quake was a shallow one, just five miles from the earth’s surface, which made it likelier to be more destructive, as shallower waves retain more of their power when hitting the surface.
The quake at 11:47 p.m. was centered 27 kilometers (17 miles) east-northeast of the city of Jalalabad in Nangarhar province, the U.S. Geological Survey said. It was just 8 kilometers (5 miles) deep. Shallower quakes tend to cause more damage.
The first tsunami waves, at 30cm high, arrived at the northern coast of Japan‘s Hokkaido prefecture before 10.40 local time (02.40 BST), Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported. Waves at 40cm high have been observed in Tokachi, in Hokkaido.
(16.11.2021)
Dass unser Gehirn langsam etwas an Masse verloren hat, ist jedoch nicht ganz so lange her: Erst vor rund 3.000 Jahren begann es zu schrumpfen.
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Die Art und Weise, wie sich Individuen in einem Ameisenstaat organisieren, ähnelt unseren modernen Gesellschaftsstrukturen. Die Insekten haben, verglichen mit ihrer Körpergröße, ein Mini-Gehirn. Es ist etwa eine Million Mal kleiner als das eines Menschen – sie können aber Großes leisten. Das Prinzip dahinter ist eine Art kollektive Intelligenz. Nicht jeder muss alles können oder wissen, es gibt eine klare Aufgabenteilung.
(22 October 2021)
But we also find that human brain size reduction was surprisingly recent, occurring in the last 3,000 years. Our dating does not support hypotheses concerning brain size reduction as a by-product of body size reduction, a result of a shift to an agricultural diet, or a consequence of self-domestication. We suggest our analysis supports the hypothesis that the recent decrease in brain size may instead result from the externalization of knowledge and advantages of group-level decision-making due in part to the advent of social systems of distributed cognition and the storage and sharing of information. Humans live in social groups in which multiple brains contribute to the emergence of collective intelligence. Although difficult to study in the deep history of Homo, the impacts of group size, social organization, collective intelligence and other potential selective forces on brain evolution can be elucidated using ants as models.
Started streaming on Feb 27, 2025
Watch live video from the International Space Station, including inside views when the crew aboard the space station is on duty. Views of Earth are also streamed from an external camera located outside of the space station. During periods of signal loss due to handover between communications satellites, a blue screen is displayed.
The space station orbits Earth about 250 miles (425 kilometers) above the surface. An international partnership of five space agencies from 15 countries operates the station, and it has been continuously occupied since November 2000. It‘s a microgravity laboratory where science, research, and human innovation make way for new technologies and research breakthroughs not possible on Earth.
Unfortunately, history repeated itself when Starship‘s upper stage made it into space only to start spinning uncontrollably before losing contact and breaking apart, sending debris cascading back to earth early Thursday evening.
One of the goals of the flight was to catch the Super Heavy booster using the chopsticks on the launch tower, which was completed successfully.