solar orbiter

The Sun breathes, and that breath has a magnetic rhythm. Every 27 days, the visible surface of the star makes a full rotation, and with it, its magnetic field, like an invisible ribbon wrapped around the star.

Two hundred and eighty-nine days: that's how long one rotation of the white dwarf white dwarf WD 1532+129 takes. This is not just a record: on its surface, near the magnetic poles, scars of iron and other metals appear — silent testimony to planets it has devoured.

A solar sail doesn't move on water but in space, and it's pushed not by wind but by the pressure of sunlight. Such a spacecraft can fly for years without spending a drop of fuel. Steering it is like sailing a yacht across an ocean where the currents are planetary gravity and the gusts of wind are shifting sunlight.

The Sun is not just a blazing ball, but a colossal orchestra, where the strings are solar filaments — giant arches of dense plasma floating in the scorching corona. They tremble, and each oscillation is an encrypted melody of magnetic fields.

Some materials are internally like a Möbius strip: their electronic states are twisted in a special way. Such topological properties are usually manipulated with a powerful magnetic field, as if trying to flatten the strip with a sledgehammer. A group of researchers has found a more delicate tool.

A spinning top that wobbles as it rotates: that's roughly how astronomers picture the neutron star in the binary system Hercules X-1. It completes one full turn on its axis every second, but its axis slowly traces a cone with a period of 35 days.

Above the Sun's limb hangs a cloud of tenuous, hot gas — a prominence. It can linger for weeks, then suddenly break loose and fly off into space. On April 15, 2023, the SPICE instrument on the Solar Orbiter probe got its first detailed look at such a cloud in ultraviolet light.

In a large gas cloud where stars are born, the magnetic field lines are roughly aligned in one direction, like the fibers in a piece of felt. But look inside, into the dense clumps that will eventually become stars, and the picture changes: there the lines are twisted every which way, like a ball of yarn after a kitten has played with it.

Eight red giants — bloated old stars like the future Sun — are not behaving by the book. Their surfaces oscillate steadily, like a bell, but within this chime there are glitches: some tones are missing, and the rhythm breaks. Scientists suspected an invisible hand inside — a magnetic field — and tried to calculate its strength.

The star GJ 436 is a dim red dwarf, and orbiting it is a Neptune-sized planet on a nearly vertical, tilted orbit. Astronomers spent 18 years taking spectra of this star to track its spots and flares. Suddenly, a rhythm emerged in the data that matched neither the star's rotation nor its 8-year activity cycle. This rhythm exactly followed the planet's orbit.

Neutron stars are the compressed cores of dead stars — city-sized objects with staggering density. Some of these stars become pulsars, cosmic lighthouses emitting strictly periodic radiation pulses.

31 Aquilae is an aging star that has puffed up into a subgiant. It once resembled the Sun, but has since cooled and grown larger. It rotates very slowly — one full turn takes many days.

A spinning top that whirls so fast it completes 220 rotations in a single second: that's exactly what China's FAST radio telescope has caught. This is the pulsar PSR J1810-0623, a neutron star the size of a city but with more mass than the Sun.

A neutron star the size of a city spins thirty times per second. Its magnetic field is trillions of times stronger than Earth's. Such conditions could spawn a cloud of axions around the star — light particles that no detector has caught yet, but which neatly explain the hidden mass of the Universe.

Solar flares — sudden energy releases on the Sun — can knock out satellites and power grids. Previous models often either cried wolf or missed a real blow. The fix: attach a reliability estimate to every prediction.

The Sun is not a calm sphere. Waves constantly ripple through its interior, like a bell after being struck. These oscillations reach the surface and reveal what's happening on the far, invisible side. Astronomers have long been able to 'listen' to this ringing and find large sunspot groups there.

Cosmic rays are charged particles that reach us from distant stellar explosions. But before hitting a detector, they must pass through the bubble of the solar wind. The Sun breathes: it inflates this bubble, then contracts it.

Three distant giant planets circle their stars so closely that a year on them lasts just a few Earth days. These worlds are called hot Jupiters, and their orbits are a real puzzle: how did they end up right next to the star if they were born far away, in the cold outskirts of the system? One key clue is the angle at which a planet orbits relative to the star's rotation.

For thirteen straight years, the Swift space observatory recorded the X-ray "breathing" of the pulsar GX 301-2. Every few minutes, the BAT instrument measured how much hard radiation came from this pair — a neutron star and its massive companion.

The Sun is not just a ball — it's a magnetic mansion. Its invisible force lines, like electrical wiring, thread through space and control space weather. But until now, we've only seen this wiring from the landing — the plane of Earth's orbit. The attic and basement, the magnetic poles, remained a mystery.

Only by passing in front of a star did Chiron reveal its secret. Three icy hoops encircle the 200-kilometer body — a hybrid of comet and asteroid. Previously, they were only hinted at by spectra of reflected light and brightness fluctuations.