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IMAGE: An artist s conception of coronal mass ejections and magnetic reconnection above photos of PPPL physicists, from left, Masaaki Yamada, Hantao Ji, and Jongsoo Yoo view more
Credit: (Astrophysical inages courtesy of NASA / headshots and collage courtesy of Elle Starkman)
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have received three awards from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) totaling over $2 million to conduct research that could help predict the potentially damaging effects of blasts of subatomic particles from the sun.
The three-year awards will fund research into a process known as magnetic reconnection, the coming together and explosive separation of magnetic field lines in plasma, that occurs throughout the universe. Scientists conjecture that magnetic reconnection helps cause the blasts, which produce vast amounts of electrically charged subatomic particles known as plasm
10 Solar System Mysteries That Baffle Our Best Scientists
Even though we’ve already told you about the mysteries of our solar system here, here, and here, we’re back with more mysterious sights and sounds that baffle our best scientists. At least one of them has fueled conspiracy theories, but that’s just part of the fun.
10Mysterious ‘Sounds’ In Space
The video above presents five mysterious “sounds” from space, three of which are definitely within our solar system. All of the sounds are actually radio waves or plasma waves translated into sound that humans can hear.
First, we hear the eerie sounds that NASA’s Cassini spacecraft detected as radio emissions from Saturn’s poles in April 2002. The variations in frequency and time corresponded to activity in Saturn’s auroras, like the radio emissions from our own northern and southern lights. Scientists believe the complex band of rising and falling tones came from many small radio sources that moved along Saturn