The Stellar Conductor of Planetary Atmospheres
A planet in the habitable zone is no guarantee of life. Like a conductor leading an orchestra, a star dictates the tempo and character of planetary atmosphere evolution over billions of years.
Why Cosmic Rays Have a Knee
Cosmic rays do not travel in straight lines. Charged particles accelerated to enormous speeds loop through the Galaxy's magnetic field like dust motes in a gust of wind. It's usually assumed that they simply scatter along and across field lines.
The Comet That Wanted to Ignite the Sun
In December 2011, Comet Lovejoy boldly raced through the searing corona of the Sun. Right after — a flare. Scientists checked whether the comet could have caused it. The atmosphere of the Sun is threaded with taut magnetic loops, like a drawn bowstring.
Magnetite: A Mystery Unsolved for a Hundred Years
A piece of magnetite, an ordinary iron stone, behaves strangely. At room temperature, it conducts electricity, but cool it below minus 150 degrees, and its resistance jumps sharply. This jump, discovered back in 1939, physicists could not explain for nearly a century.
A new study offers a solution.
Gas Jumps Over the Ring
A river flows toward a whirlpool, but a dam with a notch blocks the way. Most water piles up before the dam, but some, gaining height, leaps over it and falls straight into the funnel. So it is with gas in a galaxy: it streams toward the center but hits a ring of stars and gas, like a dam. Usually, everything stops there, swirling into a dense vortex.
Cosmic Rays Wander Between Clouds
Interstellar space is not empty: it is filled with tenuous gas, which is warm in some places and cold in others. The boundaries between such regions resemble the walls between soap bubbles.
Solar Particles and Their Winding Path
On March 30, 2022, two spacecraft — BepiColombo and STEREO-A — simultaneously felt a shockwave from the Sun. The first was at 0.6 times the Earth-Sun distance, the second at exactly one such distance.
Why Hot Stars Spin Faster
The Gaia space telescope has measured how fast more than a hundred thousand stars spin. It turns out that a star's rotation speed depends on its temperature. For stars cooler than 6500 degrees, the surface moves at 10–20 kilometers per second.
Diamond: The Mystery of Scattered Speeds
Diamond is not just a gemstone. This crystal can conduct electricity when free charge carriers, electrons and holes, appear in it. But how fast do they move? In scientific papers, numbers vary by tens of times. One lab reports a mobility of 1000 cm²/(V·s), another 4000.