April 2020
Plasma Clipper - opening the age of sail, in space travel
... can be created from a current loop – a simple loop of wire with a current flowing through it creates a magnetic field. The problem is that the magnetic field needed for this technology to work has to be big, kilometres of radius big, not metres, and...
August 2019
Lessons from the Sun
... Earth’s high latitudes to be more slowly redistributed. We are left to contemplate the effects of a similar event with a leading magnetic field anti-aligned for a long interval. It seems safe to say that the resulting geomagnetic storm would have...
11 February 2019
Earth's magnetic north pole is on the move and its going fast
... pouring out from the Sun. This shield, or rather magnetic field as we know it by, also means that our planet comes...over three times as fast as it usually does. Without the magnetic field, our little world would most likely resemble that of our ...
March 2016
Saving Earth from an Expanding Sun
... an ionosphere). Now you no longer have the armature of a dynamo but that of a motor. You’re cranking against Earth’s magnetic field and the electrodynamic tether rises. Space elevators Clearly this is a relative of the now-famous space elevator...
04 November 2019
Its official! Voyager 2 has passed into interstellar space
... process regularly occurs between the Earth and Sun’s magnetic field, so it would be no surprise to find the same thing happening between the Sun’s (magnetic) field and the interstellar field. Unlike Voyager 1 however, Voyager 2 did not come across...
31 January 2020
First images of new solar telescope produces most detailed images of the Sun
... than ever seen before and determine the causes of potentially harmful solar activity. "It's all about the magnetic field," said Thomas Rimmele, director of the Inouye Solar Telescope. "To unravel the sun's biggest mysteries, we have to not...
