New mapping in Australia has revealed a strange dent in the magnetic field beneath the country's Northern Territory.

The Australia Magnetic Anomaly, named after its similarity in shape to the country, holds valuable information about Australia's geological history, including how different rock layers formed and acquired their distinctive magnetic properties.

"Magnetic data allows us to see through the ground and understand geological architecture that would otherwise remain completely hidden," project lead Clive Foss, a senior research geoscientist with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), said in a statement.

A magnetic anomaly is a local variation in Earth's magnetic field caused by the magnetic properties of certain minerals and rocks, such as iron ore deposits, in the crust.

From the moment they form, rocks start to develop magnetic signatures that incorporate information about the direction of Earth's magnetic field at that specific time. This "magnetic memory," known as remanent magnetism, helps scientists reconstruct rocks' past.

However, the magnetic field occasionally flips, and tectonic processes can change rocks' orientation, which muddles the picture. But if scientists can decipher the various clues encrypted in a rock's magnetic signature, they can reconstruct exactly what the rock went through and when.

The Australia Magnetic Anomaly contains structures such as faults, folds and basins that traditional mapping techniques haven't been able to detect, according to the statement. To explore these hidden layers, Foss and his team used advanced modeling techniques to better visualize magnetic data collected during the Northern Territory Government's 1999 Bonney Well Survey.

For that survey, planes fitted with magnetometers — instruments that measure magnetic fields — flew across the Northern Territory in regular lines separated by about 1,300 feet (400 meters). Scientists previously tried to map these data, but the maps didn't always render magnetic signals clearly — particularly along the flight lines, according to the statement.

The new modeling has solved this problem. "My colleague, Dr Aaron Davis, created an innovative gridding algorithm which refined the dataset and produced cleaner, more consistent images," Foss said. "By improving how we process and model these datasets, we can extract more geological information than ever before."

The researchers identified subtle magnetic layers, as well as buried geological boundaries and structures that previous mapping didn't pick up.

The team is still working to interpret these findings, but preliminary results show that the western margin of the Australia Magnetic Anomaly is exposed at the surface in the Northern Territory's Hatches Creek Formation — a geological unit composed of sandstones and volcanic rocks that were deposited between 2.5 billion and 1.6 billion years ago.

Ultimately, mapping the Australia Magnetic Anomaly could lead to important geological discoveries, including opportunities for resource exploration, according to the statement. Companies and Australia's government could benefit from research that creates more detailed maps of mineral deposits.

A weak spot in Earth's protective magnetic field is growing larger and exposing orbiting satellites and astronauts to more solar radiation, according to more than a decade of measurements by three orbiting observatories.

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.

"The region of weak magnetic field in the South Atlantic has continued to increase in size over the past 11 years since the launch of the Swarm satellite constellation," explained Chris Finlay, a geomagnetism researcher at the Danmarks Tekniske Universitet. "Although its growth was expected based on early observations, it is important to confirm this change in Earth's magnetic field is continuing." Finlay is the lead author of a new study published in the journal Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors that analyzes data from the Swarm satellites.

Geomagnetic field

The three satellites were launched in 2014 to precisely monitor magnetic signals from Earth's core and mantle, as well as from the ionosphere and magnetosphere. Earth's magnetic field (technically, the "geomagnetic field") is thought to be generated by a rotating core of molten iron, roughly 2,900 kilometers, or 1,800 miles, beneath our feet. But the strength of the field changes continuously, and scientists are still learning about its exact mechanisms.

The geomagnetic field protects life on Earth's surface from harmful charged particles in solar radiation. We can see the effects of charged particles from the Sun interacting with the geomagnetic field in the upper atmosphere during aurorae such as the northern lights.

And because it extends into space, the geomagnetic field also protects orbiting spacecraft, including most satellites and the International Space Station (ISS). However, the study authors warn that spacecraft — and spacefarers — that enter the South Atlantic weak spot during their orbits of our planet could now be exposed to more radiation.

For spacecraft hardware, this radiation could cause more malfunctions, damage, or even blackouts. "The main consequence is for our low-Earth-orbit satellite infrastructure," Finlay said. "These satellites experience higher rates of charged particles when they pass through the weak field region, which can cause problems for the electronics."

Danger to astronauts

People in orbit will also face higher risks from radiation, including a greater chance of DNA damage and of suffering cancer during their lifetimes. "Astronauts will also experience these charged particles, but their times in orbit are shorter than the lifetime of most low-Earth-orbit satellites," Finlay said. (On average, astronauts on the ISS spend about 6 months in low Earth orbit, but satellites typically spend more than 5 years there — about 10 times as long.)

The geomagnetic field is relatively weak compared with more familiar forms of magnetism: Its intensity ranges from about 22,000 to 67,000 nanoteslas. In comparison, a typical refrigerator magnet has an intensity of about 10 million nanoteslas.

In the SAA, the geomagnetic field's intensity is lower than 26,000 nanoteslas. According to the study, the region's area has grown by almost 1% of the area of Earth's surface since 2014. The weakest point in the SAA now measures 22,094 nanoteslas — a decrease of 336 nanoteslas since 2014.

In the region of strong geomagnetic field over northern Canada, the intensity is greater than 57,000 nanoteslas. The study found that the area has shrunk by 0.65% of the area of Earth's surface, while its strongest spot has fallen to 58,031 nanoteslas, a drop of 801 nanoteslas since 2014. In contrast, a strong field region in Siberia has grown in size, increasing in area by 0.42% of Earth's surface area, with the maximum field intensity increasing by 260 nanoteslas since 2014 to 61,619 nanoteslas today.

These changes in the Northern Hemisphere were unexpected, Finlay said. "It is related to the circulation patterns of the liquid metal in the core, but we are not certain of the exact cause," he said.

The study did not, however, find any sign of an impending magnetic field reversal. Earth's magnetic field has already reversed hundreds of times, but "we know from paleomagnetic records that Earth's magnetic field has weakened many times in the past, displaying weak field regions like the South Atlantic Anomaly, without reversing," Finlay said. "We are more likely seeing a decade to century timescale fluctuation in the field."

"Hardened" spacecraft

The heightened danger from solar radiation to satellites and astronauts passing over the SAA could be mitigated by ensuring that spacecraft are "hardened" to withstand it, Finlay said: "Since the weakness is growing, the satellites will experience such effects over a larger area, [so] this should be taken into account when designing future missions."

Geophysicist Hagay Amit of Nantes Université in France, who wasn't involved in the latest study but who has studied the SAA, noted that several scientists have proposed possible reasons for the observed changes in the geomagnetic field, but the actual mechanisms remain unknown. "Overall, [the authors] convincingly demonstrated that continuous high-quality geomagnetic measurements are crucial for providing vital insights into the dynamics in the deep Earth," he told Eos in an email.

This article was originally published on Eos.org. Read the original article.

Physicists have discovered a new phase of matter, dubbed "half ice, half fire," that could open the door to new advancements in fields such as quantum computing.

The new phase combines a number of "up" spins of electrons within an atom, which are highly ordered and referred to as cold cycles, with a number of "down" spins, which are highly disordered and referred to as hot cycles — lending the phase its nickname, "half ice, half fire."

"Half ice, half fire" is a significant discovery not only because of its novelty but also because it can produce sharp switching between phases at reasonable temperatures. It's the twin of the "half fire, half ice" state first observed by the same team at Brookhaven National Laboratory — physicists Weiguo Yin and Alexei Tsvelik, alongside their then intern, Christopher Roth — back in 2016.

These discoveries provide insight into some of the central questions in physics and the materials sciences, according to the team, as well as advance the ability to identify new states of matter with exotic properties and manipulate the transition between those states.

"Solving those problems could lead to great advances in technologies like quantum computing and spintronics," Yin said in a statement from Brookhaven National Lab. Tsvelik added that the team's findings "may open a new door to understanding and controlling phases and phase transitions in certain materials."

Related: Exotic new state of matter discovered by squishing subatomic particles into an ultradense crystal

"Missing pieces of the puzzle"

Yin and Tsvelik first discovered "half ice, half fire" when performing research on a type of magnetic material called a ferrimagnet. Ferrimagnets have populations of atoms with opposing magnetic moments, but because the populations are unequal, some magnetization remains.

The specific ferrimagnet in which "half ice, half fire" was observed is Sr3CuIrO6, a compound that consists of strontium, copper, iridium and oxygen. It's the same material in which the team originally discovered "half fire, half ice," which they induced, or caused to occur within the ferrimagnet, by exposing the material to an external magnetic field. In "half fire, half ice," hot spins occurred on the copper sites and had smaller magnetic movements, while the iridium sites yielded cold spins with larger magnetic movements.

Although it was an exciting discovery, Tsvelik admitted that it was only a first step.

"Despite our extensive research, we still didn't know how this state could be utilized," he said. "We were missing pieces of the puzzle."

Now, the recent work, spearheaded by Yin, has revealed that "half fire, half ice" has a hidden and opposite state in which the hot and cold spins swap positions. The team identified an extremely narrow temperature range in which the switch between phases takes place, which has promising implications for a number of fields.

Commercially, this kind of ultrasharp phase switching could lead to advances in refrigeration technology. It may even be possible to utilize the phases themselves as bits in a novel approach to quantum information storage. "The door to new possibilities is now wide open," Yin said.

The team's research into the new phase was published in the journal Physical Review Letters in December 2024.

Researchers have obtained the first conclusive evidence of an elusive third class of magnetism, called altermagnetism. Their findings, published Dec. 11 in the journal Nature, could revolutionize the design of new high-speed magnetic memory devices and provide the missing puzzle piece in the development of better superconducting materials.

"We have previously had two well-established types of magnetism," study author Oliver Amin, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Nottingham in the U.K., told Live Science. "Ferromagnetism, where the magnetic moments, which you can picture like small compass arrows on the atomic scale, all point in the same direction. And antiferromagnetism, where the neighboring magnetic moments point in opposite directions — you can picture that more like a chessboard of alternating white and black tiles."

Electron spins within an electrical current must point in one of two directions and can align with or against these magnetic moments to store or carry information, forming the basis of magnetic memory devices.

A new form of magnetism

Altermagnetic materials, first theorized in 2022, have a structure that sits somewhere in between. Each individual magnetic moment points in the opposite direction as its neighbor, as in an antiferromagnetic material. But each unit is slightly twisted relative to this adjacent magnetic atom, resulting in some ferromagnetic-like properties.

Altermagnets, therefore, combine the best properties of both ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic materials. "The benefit of ferromagnets is that we have an easy way of reading and writing memory using these up or down domains," study co-author Alfred Dal Din, a doctoral student also at the University of Nottingham, told Live Science. "But because these materials have a net magnetism, that information is also easy to lose by wiping a magnet over it."

Related: 'A force more powerful than gravity within the Earth': How magnetism locked itself inside our planet

Conversely, antiferromagnetic materials are much more challenging to manipulate for information storage. Because they have a net zero magnetism, however, information in these materials is much more secure and faster to carry. "Altermagnets have the speed and resilience of an antiferromagnet, but they also have this important property of ferromagnets called time reversal symmetry breaking," Dal Din said.

This mind-bending property looks at the symmetry of objects moving forward and backward in time. "For example, gas particles fly around, randomly colliding and filling up the space," Amin said. "If you rewind time, that behavior looks no different."”

This means the symmetry is conserved. However, because electrons possess both a quantum spin and a magnetic moment, reversing time — and, therefore, the direction of travel — flips the spin, meaning the symmetry is broken. "If you look at those two electron systems — one where time is progressing normally and one where you're in rewind — they look different, so the symmetry is broken," Amin explained. "This allows certain electrical phenomena to exist."

Finding ‘the missing link’ of superconductivity

The team — led by Peter Wadley, a professor of physics at the University of Nottingham — used a technique called photoemission electron microscopy to image the structure and magnetic properties of manganese telluride, a material formerly believed to be antiferromagnetic.

"Different aspects of the magnetism become illuminated depending on the polarization of the X-rays we choose," Amin said. Circularly polarized light revealed the different magnetic domains created by the time reversal symmetry breaking, while horizontally or vertically polarized X-rays allowed the team to measure the direction of the magnetic moments throughout the material. By combining the results of both experiments, the researchers created the first-ever map of the different magnetic domains and structures within an altermagnetic material.

With this proof of concept in place, the team fabricated a series of altermagnetic devices by manipulating the internal magnetic structures through a controlled thermal cycling technique.

"We were able to form these exotic vortex textures in both hexagonal and triangular devices," Amin said. "These vortices are gaining more and more attention within spintronics as potential carriers of information, so this was a nice first example of how to create a practical device."

The study authors said the power to both image and control this new form of magnetism could revolutionize the design of next-generation memory devices, with increased operational speeds and enhanced resilience and ease of use.

"Altermagnetism will also help with the development of superconductivity," Dal Din said. "For a long time, there's been a hole in the symmetries between these two areas, and this class of magnetic material that has remained elusive up until now turns out to be this missing link in the puzzle."

Editor's Note: This story was updated on Friday, Jan. 24 at 10:05 a.m. EST to replace a diagram showing altermagnetism with one showing the correct electron spin orientation.

Our understanding of Uranus could have been wrong for nearly four decades, new research suggests — and a weird space weather event is likely to blame.

Much of what we know about Uranus is taken from data gathered by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft, which zipped past the ice giant in 1986. The probe's observations revealed the planet had a bizarrely lopsided magnetic field that is misaligned with the planet's rotation and filled with unusually energetic electrons.

But a new analysis of Voyager 2's data revealed the likely cause of the strange readings: a burst of solar wind that whacked the planet's magnetic field out of shape just before the probe flew by. In other words, our understanding of Uranus may be based on an anomalous snapshot in time, rather than the planet's typical nature. The researchers published their findings Nov. 11 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

"If Voyager 2 had arrived just a few days earlier, it would have observed a completely different magnetosphere at Uranus," study lead author Jamie Jasinski, a space plasma physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, said in a statement. "The spacecraft saw Uranus in conditions that only occur about 4% of the time."

Magnetic fields form around planets thanks to the churning movement of material inside their molten cores, and they shield planets from jets of plasma known as solar wind that are launched from the sun. When solar particle radiation hits a planet's magnetosphere, it gets trapped by magnetic field lines and is shuffled along it into pockets called radiation belts.

Related: Scientists finally know why ultraviolent superstorms flare up on Uranus and Neptune

It was Uranus's radiation belts — alongside its lopsided magnetic field — that baffled scientists when the first readings from Voyager 2 appeared. The planet's magnetosphere was packed with electron radiation belts second in intensity only to Jupiter. But the rest of the field was devoid of plasma, revealing no apparent source that fed the radiation belts.

The deficit of plasma elsewhere also led scientists to conclude that water ions were not being produced by Uranus' five major moons, four of which are encased in ice. This led astronomers at the time to think that these moons were likely geologically inactive and therefore likely lacked hidden oceans.

By reanalyzing the readings in light of the recorded outburst of solar wind, the researchers behind the new study found that, just before Voyager 2's flyby, the solar wind drove the typical plasma out of Uranus' magnetosphere, knocking it temporarily out of shape and injecting electrons into its radiation belt — similar to how Earth's magnetic field becomes charged-up and warped when hit by intense solar storms.

"The flyby was packed with surprises, and we were searching for an explanation of its unusual behavior," Linda Spilker, a senior research scientist at the JPL who was involved in the Voyager 2 mission, said in the statement. "The magnetosphere Voyager 2 measured was only a snapshot in time. This new work explains some of the apparent contradictions, and it will change our view of Uranus once again."

Astronomers have spotted the biggest pair of black hole jets ever seen — at 23 million light-years in length, they are as long as 140 Milky Way galaxies laid end to end.

The enormous jet pair, nicknamed Porphyrion after a giant in Greek mythology, are gigantic beams of ionized matter that erupted from a black hole at close to light speed. Their origin is a massive black hole 7.5 billion light-years away from Earth, which they burst from with the power of trillions of stars.

The jets were discovered among 10,000 others in a survey by Europe's Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope. By studying the tendrils of these colossal outflows, scientists hope to understand how they shaped the early cosmos into the form we see today. The researchers published their findings Sept. 17 in the journal Nature.

"This pair is not just the size of a solar system, or a Milky Way; we are talking about 140 Milky Way diameters in total," study lead author Martijn Oei, a postdoctoral scholar of observational astronomy at Caltech, said in an email statement. "The Milky Way would be a little dot in these two giant eruptions."

Supermassive black holes typically sit at the centers of galaxies, sucking in matter from their surroundings before spitting it out at extreme speeds, creating a feedback process that shapes how galaxies evolve.

But scientists still don't fully understand how the cosmic engines and the jets they expel affect the galaxies around them.

Related: Monster black hole is starving its host galaxy to death, James Webb telescope reveals

To better answer that question, the researchers searched for hidden black hole jets by scanning the LOFAR radio images by eye, using machine learning tools and citizen scientists to help identify any jets they missed.

Once they spotted the first hints of Porphyrion's gigantic wisps of gas, the researchers turned to follow-up observations using India's Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) in Arizona to trace the jets' origins to a massive galaxy that's about 10 times bigger than the Milky Way.

Further observations made with the Keck Observatory in Hawaii revealed the exact location of Porphyrion and showed that its plumes stretched far into the superhighways of filaments that connect and feed galaxies, which is known as the cosmic web.

"Up until now, these giant jet systems appeared to be a phenomenon of the recent universe," Oei said. "If distant jets like these can reach the scale of the cosmic web, then every place in the universe may have been affected by black hole activity at some point in cosmic time."

Porphyrion's enormous size — roughly 40 Milky Ways bigger than the previously biggest known jet structure named Alcyoneus — suggests that the belchings of supermassive black holes played an even more pivotal role in the formation of today's universe than first thought.

Porphyrion also emerged from a type of black hole that is common in the early universe but was not previously thought to produce giant jets, meaning that more of these eruptions could be lurking in the early universe.

"We may be looking at the tip of the iceberg," Oei said. "Our LOFAR survey only covered 15 percent of the sky. And most of these giant jets are likely difficult to spot, so we believe there are many more of these behemoths out there."

The researchers' next steps will be to investigate how gigantic jets shaped the early universe as they spewed cosmic rays, heavy atoms, heat and magnetic fields across galaxies.

"The magnetism on our planet allows life to thrive, so we want to understand how it came to be," Oei said. "We know magnetism pervades the cosmic web, then makes its way into galaxies and stars, and eventually to planets, but the question is: Where does it start? Have these giant jets spread magnetism through the cosmos?"

The image of an atom, with electrons swarming around a central nucleus bulging with protons and neutrons, is as iconic in our perception of science as the DNA helix or the rings of Saturn. But however much we scratch the surface of these scientific fundamentals, we can go even deeper, focusing that microscope further and discovering even more forces that govern our world.

In his new book "CHARGE: Why Does Gravity Rule?", theoretical physicist Frank Close explores the fundamental forces that govern our world, posing questions along the way that seek to explain how the delicate balance of positive and negative charges paved the way for gravity to shape our universe.

In this excerpt, he explains how magnetism, the most tangible fundamental forces, was discovered, where it comes from and how it got its name.   

Related: Why is matter neutral? Physicist Frank Close explores the mystery in his new book

The force within

Magnetism is a manifestation of electricity, and vice versa. Electricity and magnetism were imprinted into our surroundings from the beginning. Five billion years ago when the new-born Earth was a hot plasma of swirling electrical currents, these flows created magnetic fields. As the magma cooled to form what is today the world's solid outer crust, magnetism was locked into minerals containing iron, such as magnetite.

Today, the Earth's liquid core is still a terpsichorean frenzy of electric currents, which generate a magnetic field. This extends into the atmosphere and far beyond, invisible to our normal senses. But in spreading from its source in the molten core to the heavens above, it first permeates the Earth's crust. This is where it leaves a tangible imprint, evidence that there exists a force more powerful than gravity at work within the Earth whose influence extends very far.

Way back in the earliest Precambrian, four billion years ago, as the surface cooled, atomic elements accumulated in the strata. The most stable of these, iron, is today one of the most abundant elements in the crust. Igneous rocks formed from volcanic lava. These rocks have the property that in the presence of a magnetic field, their atoms of iron act like soldiers on parade as they themselves become magnetic. This is exploited in popular demonstrations where the magnetic field of a bar magnet can be made visible.

Small filings of iron are first scattered on the surface of a table and then a magnet is placed carefully among them. Its magnetic field induces magnetism in the iron filings, turning them into thousands of miniature magnets. Each of these duly orients itself in the magnetic field, revealing how the direction of the magnetic force varies from place to place. 

Related: Why do magnets have north and south poles?

The bar magnet is a simple model illustrating what happens for the magnetic Earth itself. Earth's north and south magnetic poles are analogous to those of the bar magnet, our planet's magnetic field extending far into space. There are no iron filings out in space, but there are large amounts of iron ores in the hills, cliffs, and mountains on Earth. In some places, by chance, these magnetic clusters are quite extensive, as on the Isle of Elba and Mount Ida in Asia Minor, where large outcrops retain the magnetic imprint in rocks known historically as lodestone, now named magnetite. 

There are legends how thousands of years ago in ancient Greece, a shepherd wearing leather shoes held in place by iron nails stumbled — literally — across magnetite when the powerful magnetism gripped the nails in his footwear. Whether or not a shepherd named Magnes discovered the eponymous rock, and if so whether it was in Magnesia, north of Athens, or on Mount Ida in Asia Minor, or even another Mount Ida in Crete, it is very likely that such experiences, if less dramatic than in the story, would have happened on various occasions. 

Certainly, the power of magnetism would have been apparent ever since the Iron Age. Lightning is a flash of electric current which generates intense magnetic fields and magnetizes ferrous rocks. Smelting to retrieve the pure iron metal from these sources would have revealed their magnetic attraction. So, the phenomenon has probably been known for some 3,000 years. Like the discovery of fire, that of magnetism probably arose in several places independently, all inspired by the natural magnetization of iron in rocks. 

For magnetic rocks are ubiquitous. By the sixteenth century travellers recorded the best examples, from East India and the Chinese coast: "Very massive and weighty, [the stone] will draw or lift up the just weight of itself in iron or steel" [Robert Norman, The Newe Attractive, 1581]. As knowledge of the phenomenon spread from Greek myth to Latin, and on to English, the names morphed into 'Magnes rock' or 'magnet'. 

© [Oxford University Press]

Extract from CHARGE: Why Does Gravity Rule? by Frank Close, published by Oxford University Press, available in hardback and eBook formats 

A bizarre type of magnetic quasiparticle that looks like a tiny, swirling bubble could one day be used as a computing bit in future memory devices after scientists sped it up enough to transmit data.

"Skyrmions" — informally called "nanobubbles" by the scientists — are formed of a few dozen atoms and are just a few nanometers in width. By contrast, a strand of human hair is up to 100,000 nanometers thick. A skyrmion generates itself from magnetic field lines as it moves through a medium. The quasiparticle comprises elementary nanomagnets, called spins, that wind together over the magnetic lines to form a whirling, spiral structure that resembles a tight knot.

Scientists have long theorized that skyrmions could potentially be used to store data — where the presence of a skyrmion will encode a 1 and its absence will encode 0. For instance, IBM researchers used skyrmions in a prototype device called "racetrack memory." Previous research has also identified them as a candidate for qubits, or quantum bits, in quantum computers.

In a new study, published April 19 in the journal Science, scientists argue that skyrmions can be used to store information in a new type of "universal memory." Such a component would combine the best of separate ones in computers today — namely, short-term memory, like random access memory (RAM), and flash memory, such as solid-state drives (SSDs) or hard drives.

RAM is fast but occupies a lot of space and needs a constant power supply, meaning data is wiped when a computer is turned off. Flash memory, meanwhile, is dense and can retain data without power, but its data transfer speeds are much slower than RAM. They all use electrons as bits.

Related: The 7 most powerful supercomputers in the world right now

In the new study, the researchers say skyrmions could be used in place of electrons as a new type of bit that could eliminate these limitations.

"The advantage of magnetic skyrmions is that they combine non-volatility, namely, the information is stored permanently with no power consumption, fast manipulation and high density," lead study author Olivier Boulle, a research scientist at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), told Live Science.

Previously, skyrmions had only moved as fast as 100 meters per second (roughly 225 mph), which is too slow to compete with state-of-the-art technologies, the scientists said. But in the study, they sped up skyrmions to speeds of 900 m/s (approximately 2,000 mph). This is an "important step for skyrmion-based devices," Boulle said.

They sped up the nanobubbles by moving them through an antiferromagnetic material with a current — and they calculated the speed by measuring how long the quasiparticles took to travel through the material using "very high spatial resolution magnetic microscopy."

Permanent magnets result from ferromagnetism, while antiferromagnetism is a type of magnetism in which adjacent ions behave as tiny magnets that align themselves in antiparallel arrangements throughout the material. The antiferromagnetic stacks they used consisted of two ferromagnetic layers, such as cobalt, separated by a thick, non-magnetic layer with opposite magnetization.

Simulations as part of this study showed skyrmions can not only store data but perform calculations too, Boulle added. For example, he said his team recently demonstrated that it's possible to perform logical operations with them — and the researchers are currently trying to use them in a basic artificial intelligence (AI) chip.

If exploited in future research, skyrmions could become the basis of a component that combines the functionality of a central processing unit (CPU) and the storage capabilities of universal memory, Boulle said. Such a component could lead to much faster machines than we have today because data wouldn't need to travel between a CPU and the different memory components avoiding a bottleneck in processing speeds.

Scientists have discovered a new mechanism in which a concentrated laser beam can change the magnetic state of a solid material. The finding could one day be harnessed in ultrafast computing memory, the researchers say.

The scientists formulated a new equation that describes the link between the amplitude of the magnetic field of light, its frequency and the energy absorption properties of a magnetic material. The scientists published their findings in a study on Jan. 3 in the journal Physical Review Research.

The equation is "completely new and also very elemental," study co-author Amir Capua, a physics professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told Live Science.

Although the discovery builds on the field known as "magneto-optics," this represents a new paradigm because scientists didn't previously understand that the magnetic component of a rapidly oscillating light wave can control magnets, he said. The equation describes the characteristics of this interaction.

Computer memory uses miniature electromagnets that are magnetized with voltage to enable the binary states of "on" or "off" to encode data, which are read and reinterpreted by a processor as 1 or 0. 

The most common computing memory, like those found in laptops or phones, comes in the form of dynamic random access memory (DRAM). This is volatile, meaning when power is switched off, all data held is lost, but it's easier to engineer, uses common materials and has low error rates — and those few errors are easy to detect and fix.

The new finding is more relevant for a technology called magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM), which is a non-volatile memory more commonly used in spacecraft as well as military and other industrial applications, according to MRAM-info.

Related: 'Universal memory' breakthrough brings the next generation of computers 1 step closer to major speed boost

Interaction between a magnetic material and radiation is well established when they are in equilibrium, but less is known about this relationship when they are not in equilibrium. It's also an area that overlaps with the weird laws of quantum mechanics, which are being harnessed to build quantum computers.

"We've arrived at a very elementary equation describing this interaction. It lets us completely reconsider optical magnetic recording and navigate our way to a dense, energy-efficient, cost-efficient optical magnetic storage device that doesn't even exist yet," Capua said.

Previous efforts to use the magnetic component of a light beam to flip a magnetic bit in this way were not effective, Capua said. But the new equation could help researchers to successfully incorporate the mechanism, he said.

In the far future, this technology could lead to MRAM components that are faster and more efficient than today's state-of-the-art RAM units, he added.

Optical cycle times (the time for an optical electromagnetic wave to complete an oscillation, in megahertz) in the technology could be a million times faster than in conventional memory. Electrical cycle times operate on nanoscale timescales (a second is 1 billion nanoseconds) whereas typical optical beams work in picoseconds (a second is 1 trillion seconds). 

It may also one day lead to quantum memory for quantum computers, in which a beam of light can fix a magnetic bit in neither 0 nor 1 but a superposition of the two states — much like how qubits work in quantum computers. Even though that's beyond the precision engineering of today, Capua said his team's findings could lead to the discovery of materials that could one day be used in such technology.

It can also make digitized memory systems more energy-efficient by giving the device more control over the strength and duration of the light beam and its effects. "The duration of the optical beam and its energy can be chosen to reduce the writing power. Obviously, when the device is idle it doesn't consume any energy since magnetic memories are nonvolatile," he said.

Wires, metal pipes, kitchenware: in our everyday experience, copper is not attracted to magnets. Yet lots of strange experiments show copper behaving a bit weirdly around magnetic fields. So what's going on? Is copper magnetic or not? And how can it interact with magnets?

It turns out, all elements have magnetic properties. The metals we typically consider magnetic — iron, nickel and cobalt — are a special class of elements known as ferromagnets, which interact particularly strongly with magnetic fields and make permanent magnets.

But there are several other, much weaker types of magnetism, said Michael Coey, a professor emeritus of physics at Trinity College Dublin. Most elements are either paramagnetic or diamagnetic. "With paramagnets, when you apply a magnetic field, you get a very small magnetization in the direction of the field," he said. This means that the element is very slightly attracted to the magnet, but the effect is only temporary and disappears as soon as the magnet is removed.

"For diamagnets, when you apply a magnetic field, you get an even smaller magnetization in the opposite direction to the field," Coey told Live Science. This creates a tiny repulsive force toward the magnet that, again, disappears without the magnetic field. So, under everyday conditions, we would never notice that paramagnetic and diamagnetic materials have any magnetic properties.

Copper is an example of a diamagnetic material, but exactly which category an element falls into depends on the electrons. These negatively charged particles orbit the central nucleus of an atom in defined layers called shells, which are further divided into levels called the s orbital, the d orbitals and the p orbitals.

Related: Why does copper turn green?

For metals in the center of the periodic table, the s orbital is already filled with two electrons, and moving from left to right across the row, the d orbitals gradually fill with a maximum of 10 electrons. As the orbitals fill up, electrons are forced to pair, and this determines the elements' magnetic properties. Elements with more unpaired electrons are paramagnetic, and those with more paired electrons are diamagnetic.

Each electron also possesses a strange quantum property called spin. The direction (up or down) of all of the electron spins in an atom defines the strength of the magnetism. "When different electrons align their spins in parallel [in the same direction], the atom has a magnetic moment," Coey said. "But if the electrons align their spins antiparallel [in opposite directions], the magnetic moment cancels out."

Copper is in the ninth position, so we would expect it to have two electrons in the s orbital and nine in the d orbitals. But unusually, copper takes one electron out of the full s orbital to completely fill up the d orbitals instead. This means all of the d electrons are paired, with equal numbers spinning up and down. Consequently, there is no magnetic moment, so we don't observe any magnetic behavior under normal conditions.

However, this unusual configuration means that copper can interact with magnets in a different and extremely important way. Magnetism is closely linked with electricity — a phenomenon described in physics by Lenz's law.

"In essence, a changing magnetic field will induce a current within a conductor," said Ernesto Bosque, a physicist at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Florida. "Because copper has such a low electrical resistance, currents can flow very easily in [it]."

It's the unpaired s electron that makes copper such an excellent conductor. This effect, known as electromagnetic induction, is central to how we generate electricity today. "A stator is essentially a set of rotating insulated wires that move around a core. This can be used as a motor or a generator," Bosque told Live Science in an email. The same idea also works in reverse: A current passed through coils of wire can generate a magnetic field in a metal core, creating an electromagnet.

Copper's ability to interact with a magnet, despite not being ferromagnetic, is something we rely on every day to power electronic devices, store data on hard drives, and even slow down roller coasters.

Earth is unique in the solar system for a number of reasons: It's the only planet with a breathable oxygen atmosphere, it's covered in liquid water and it's the only celestial body (that we know of) to harbor life. An often-overlooked characteristic that makes our planet special, however, is that it's the only rocky body in the inner solar system with strong magnetic poles  — your compass would be useless on Mars.

But where do these poles come from, and what do they do? To answer these questions, let's start with a journey to the center of our planet.

Earth's core is separated into two layers: the solid inner core and the molten metal outer core. Both layers are made of a cocktail of magnetic iron and nickel, with a few dashes of lighter elements, such as oxygen, silicon and sulfur.

The inner core is extremely dense and hot, like a giant incandescent marble. But the outer core is fluid, and it swirls around this solid mass with its own convective current. It's this constant convection that generates Earth's magnetic field, John Tarduno, a geophysicist at the University of Rochester in New York, told Live Science.

Related: What if Earth's magnetic field disappeared?

As heat from the inner core continuously radiates into the outer core, it meets material cooled by plate tectonic activity. This cycle drives convection, giving rise to the so-called geodynamo that produces the magnetic field.

Other planets, like Mars and Venus, don't have magnetic fields, in part because they lack plate tectonics. Evidence suggests that these planets may have once had self-sustaining geodynamos but that they petered out for unknown reasons. Mercury does have a weak magnetic field, but it is only 1.1% as strong as Earth's and doesn't do much to shield the planet from solar radiation.

As the liquid metal in Earth's outer core flows, its motion and high iron content cause the planet to act like a huge dipolar magnet, with one negatively charged pole and one positively charged pole. Around 80% of Earth's magnetic field is organized this way, but the remaining 20% is non-dipolar; rather than forming parallel bands of magnetic force, there are certain regions where the field swirls and eddies, behaving "like weather patterns that kind of float around," Tarduno said.

These irregular patterns produce weird patches in the magnetic field — places like the South Atlantic Anomaly, a large swath of the Atlantic Ocean where the intensity of Earth's magnetosphere dips dramatically. Researchers think this "dent" in the magnetic field arises from unusual tectonic activity underneath Africa. Areas like the South Atlantic Anomaly are fascinating, but they are also concerning, for a couple of reasons.

"The magnetosphere is like a protective envelope," Joshua Feinberg, a geologist who specializes in paleomagnetism at the University of Minnesota, told Live Science. It helps to deflect huge amounts of dangerous solar radiation away from Earth, acting like a planetwide layer of sunscreen. In areas where the magnetosphere is weak, extra doses of radiation leak through, potentially contributing to higher rates of skin cancer.

"Another concern is the effect on satellites," Tarduno said. Bursts of radiation from the sun  called coronal mass ejections can knock out satellites and other spacecraft if they aren't shielded by Earth's magnetic field. This can have catastrophic effects for telecommunications, internet access and GPS services in anomaly-impacted areas.

The South Atlantic Anomaly may be 11 million years old, according to a 2020 paper published in the journal PNAS,  and it might be connected to another planetary magnetic-field phenomenon: pole reversal.

The history of Earth's magnetic field is written in ancient lava flows and deep-sea sediments. These types of rocky material are rich in magnetic metal fragments, such as tiny chips of iron, which orient themselves along magnetic-field lines. "Eventually, that original alignment gets locked into the sediments, and we get these deep-time records of how the Earth's magnetic field was oriented," Feinberg said.

From these records, scientists know that our planet's magnetic poles drift over time. Currently, the geographic North Pole is about 310 miles (500 kilometers) away from its corresponding magnetic pole (which is technically magnetic south, at the moment). And roughly every 300,000 years, the poles suddenly flip, reversing magnetic north and south, according to NASA.

However, the paleogeomagnetic record shows that a complete pole reversal hasn't happened in about 780,000 years. Some researchers believe this means that we're due for a flip — and that the strength of the South Atlantic Anomaly could indicate that one is close.

If the poles were to reverse, Earth's magnetic field would dip to 20% strength, possibly for centuries. Such an event would plunge our current global communications system into disarray. However, other studies suggest that a flip is not imminent.

Either way, Feinberg said, studying our planet's interior and the paleogeomagnetic record will help us understand the complex interplay between the magnetosphere and life on Earth — and possibly help us prepare for future change.

An enormous "solar tornado" the size of 14 Earths stacked on top of each other recently raged on the sun's surface for three whole days. The enormous plasma twister may be one of the largest ever recorded.

The solar tornado emerged near the sun's north pole on March 15 and continued to grow and shape-shift until it finally dissipated on March 18, when the fiery twister "overtorqued itself" and spit out a plume of plasma, or ionized gas, into space, Spaceweather.com reported. The ejected plasma will not hit Earth.

Astrophotographer and Arizona resident Andrew McCarthy tweeted that the solar tornado was "14 Earths tall," which is around 111,000 miles (178,000 kilometers) tall. The twister also rained "moon-sized" globs of plasma on the solar surface, he added.

A 2013 study in the journal Solar Origins of Space Weather and Space Climate notes that solar tornadoes are typically 15,500 to 62,000 miles (25,000 to 100,000 km) tall, which would appear tiny compared with the latest gigantic twister. The study also reveals that solar tornadoes normally form in small groups — another aspect that makes this lone cone unusual.

Related: 10 solar storms that blew us away in 2022

What caused the solar tornado?

"Unlike tornadoes on Earth, which are shaped by wind, tornadoes on the sun are controlled by magnetism," according to Spaceweather.com. Horseshoe-shaped loops of plasma attached to the solar surface, known as solar prominences, get stuck in rapidly rotating magnetic fields, which trap and then spin the ionized gas into a twister.

But what causes these rotating magnetic fields? 

A 2013 study in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics found that a 2011 solar tornado was preceded by three separate nearby solar flares within 10 hours. The researchers proposed that the flares weakened the magnetic field in the area, creating an expanding coronal cavity that began to spin as a result.

This is not the only bizarre plasma structure that has been seen near the sun's poles in recent months.

On March 9, a 62,000-mile-tall "plasma waterfall" was spotted near the sun's south pole. The falling wall of plasma is known as a "polar crown prominence," a type of solar prominence that often collapses inward due to the intense magnetic fields at the poles. And on Feb. 2, a massive solar prominence broke off from the sun's north pole and became trapped in an enormous and fast-moving polar vortex that lasted about eight hours. 

These peculiar phenomena are likely becoming more common because solar activity is ramping up in intensity as the sun approaches a peak in its 11-year solar cycle, known as the solar maximum, which is scheduled to arrive in 2025. 

Researchers have discovered a new particle that is a magnetic relative of the Higgs boson. Whereas the discovery of the Higgs boson required the tremendous particle-accelerating power of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), this never-before-seen particle  —  dubbed the axial Higgs boson — was found using an experiment that would fit on a small kitchen countertop. 

As well as being a first in its own right, this magnetic cousin of the Higgs boson  —  the particle responsible for granting other particles their mass  —  could be a candidate for dark matter, which accounts for 85%t of the total mass of the universe but only reveals itself through gravity.

"When my student showed me the data I thought she must be wrong," Kenneth Burch, a professor of physics at Boston College and lead researcher of the team that made the discovery, told Live Science. "It’s not every day you find a new particle sitting on your tabletop."

The axial Higgs boson differs from the Higgs boson, which was first detected by the ATLAS and CMS detectors at the LHC a decade ago in 2012 ,  because it has a magnetic moment, a magnetic strength or orientation that creates a magnetic field. As such, it requires a more complex theory to describe it than its non-magnetic mass-granting cousin. 

In the Standard Model of particle physics, particles emerge from different fields that permeate the universe, and some of these particles shape the universe’s fundamental forces. For example photons mediate electromagnetism, and hefty particles known as W and Z bosons mediate the weak nuclear force, which governs nuclear decay at subatomic levels. When the universe was young and hot, however, electromagnetism and weak force were one thing and all of these particles were nearly identical. As the universe cooled, the electroweak force split, causing the W and Z bosons to gain mass and to behave very differently from photons, a process physicists have called "symmetry breaking." But how exactly did these weak-force-mediating particles get so heavy? 

It turns out that  these particles interacted with a separate field, known as the Higgs field. Perturbations in that field gave rise to the Higgs boson and lent the W and Z bosons their heft. 

Related:

The Higgs boson is produced in nature whenever such a symmetry is broken, . "however, typically only one symmetry is broken at a time, and thus the Higgs is just described by its energy," Burch said.

The theory behind the axial Higgs boson is more complicated.

"In the case of the axial Higgs boson, it appears multiple symmetries are broken together, leading to a new form of the theory and a Higgs mode [the specific oscillations of a quantum field like the Higgs field] that requires multiple parameters to describe it: specifically, energy and magnetic momentum," Burch said.

Burch, who along with colleagues described the new magnetic Higgs cousin in a study published Wednesday (June 8) in the journal Nature, explained that the original Higgs boson doesn’t couple directly with light, meaning it has to be created by smashing other particles together with enormous magnets and high-powered lasers while also cooling samples to extremely cold temperatures. It's the decay of those original particles into others that pop fleetingly into existence that reveals the presence of the Higgs.

The axial Higgs boson, on the other hand, arose when room-temperature quantum materials mimicked a specific set of oscillations, called the axial Higgs mode. Researchers then used the scattering of light to observe the particle.

"We found the axial Higgs boson using a tabletop optics experiment which sits on a table measuring about 1 x 1 meters by focusing on a material with a unique combination of properties," Burch continued. "Specifically we used rare-earth Tritelluride (RTe3) [a quantum material with a highly 2D crystal structure]. The electrons in RTe3 self-organize into a wave where the density of the charge is periodically enhanced or reduced."

The size of these charge density waves,   which emerge above room temperature,  can be modulated over time, producing the axial Higgs mode.

In the new study, the team created the axial Higgs mode by sending laser light of one color into the RTe3 crystal. The light scattered and changed to a color of lower frequency in a process known as Raman scattering, and the energy lost during the color change created the axial Higgs mode. The team then rotated the crystal and found that the axial Higgs mode also controls the angular momentum of the electrons, or  the rate at which they move in a circle, in the material meaning this mode must also be magnetic.

“Originally we were simply investigating the light scattering properties of this material. When carefully examining the symmetry of the response  —  how it differed as we rotated the sample  —  we discovered anomalous changes that were the initial hints of something new,” Burch explained. “As such, it is the first such magnetic Higgs to be discovered and indicates the collective behavior of the electrons in RTe3 is unlike any state previously seen in nature.”

Particle physicists had previously predicted an axial Higgs mode and even used it to explain dark matter, but this is the first time it has been observed. This is also the first time scientists have observed a state with multiple broken symmetries.

Symmetry breaking occurs when a symmetric system that appears the same in all directions becomes asymmetric. Oregon University suggests thinking of this as being like a spinning coin that has two possible states. The coin eventually falls onto its head or tail face thus releasing energy and becoming asymmetrical.  

The fact that this double symmetry-breaking still jibes with current physics theories is exciting, because it could be a way of creating hitherto unseen particles that could account for dark matter.

“The basic idea is that to explain dark matter you need a theory consistent with existing particle experiments, but producing new particles that have not yet been seen,” Burch said. 

Adding this extra symmetry-breaking via the axial Higgs mode is one way to accomplish that, he said.  Despite being predicted by physicists, the observation of the axial Higgs boson came as a surprise to the team, and they spent a year attempting to verify their results, Burch said.

Originally published on Live Science.

Albert Einstein began formulating the theory of relativity in 1905 to explain the behavior of objects in space and time, and the groundbreaking work can be used to predict things such as the existence of black holes, light bending due to gravity and the behavior of planets in their orbits.

The theory is deceptively simple. First, there is no "absolute" frame of reference: Every time you measure an object's velocity, its momentum or how it experiences time, it's always in relation to something else. Second, the speed of light is the same no matter who measures it or how fast the person measuring it is going. Third, nothing can go faster than light.

Einstein's most famous theory has profound implications. If the speed of light is always the same, it means that an astronaut going very fast relative to Earth will measure the seconds ticking by more slowly than an Earthbound observer will. Time essentially slows down for the astronaut — a phenomenon called time dilation.

Related: What would happen if the speed of light was much lower?

Any object in a big gravity field accelerates, so it also experiences time dilation. Meanwhile, the astronaut's spaceship experiences length contraction, which means  if you took a picture of the spacecraft as it flew by, it would look as though it were "squished" in the direction of motion. To the astronaut on board, however, all would seem normal. In addition, the mass of the spaceship would appear to increase from the point of view of people on Earth.

But you don't necessarily need a spaceship zooming at near light speed to see relativistic effects. There are several instances of relativity we can see in our daily lives and technologies we use today that demonstrate Einstein was right. Here are some common examples of the theory of relativity in action.

Electromagnets

Magnetism is a relativistic effect, and you can see this demonstrated in generators. If you take a loop of wire and move it through a magnetic field, you generate an electric current. The charged particles in the wire are affected by the changing magnetic field, which forces some of them to move and creates the current.

But now, picture the wire at rest and imagine the magnet is moving. In this case, the charged particles in the wire (the electrons and protons) aren't moving anymore, so the magnetic field shouldn't be affecting them. But it does, and a current still flows. This shows that there is no privileged frame of reference. 

Thomas Moore, a professor of physics at Pomona College in Claremont, California, uses the principle of relativity to demonstrate Faraday's law, which states that a changing magnetic field creates an electric current.

"Since this is the core principle behind transformers and electric generators, anyone who uses electricity is experiencing the effects of relativity," Moore told Live Science.

Electromagnets work via relativity as well. When a direct current of electric charge flows through a wire, electrons drift through the material. Ordinarily, the wire would seem electrically neutral, with no net positive or negative charge, because the wire has about the same number of protons (positive charges) and electrons (negative charges). But if you put another wire with a direct current next to it, the wires attract or repel each other, depending on the direction in which the current is moving, according to physicists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Assuming the currents are moving in the same direction, the electrons in the second wire are motionless compared to the electrons in the first wire. (This assumes the currents are about the same strength.) Meanwhile, the protons in both wires are moving in comparison to the electrons in both wires. Because of the relativistic length contraction, they appear to be more closely spaced, so there's more positive charge than negative charge per length of wire. Because like charges repel, the two wires also repel.

Currents in the opposite directions result in attraction, because compared to the first wire, the electrons in the other wire are more crowded, thus creating a net negative charge, according to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Meanwhile, the protons in the first wire are creating a net positive charge, and opposite charges attract. 

GPS navigation

For your car's GPS navigation to function as accurately as it does, satellites have to consider relativistic effects, according to PhysicsCentral. This is because even though satellites aren't moving anywhere close to the speed of light, they are still going pretty fast. The satellites are also sending signals to ground stations on Earth. These stations (and the GPS technology in a car or smartphone) are all experiencing higher accelerations due to gravity than the satellites in orbit.

To get that pinpoint accuracy, the satellites use clocks that are accurate to a few nanoseconds (billionths of a second). Because each satellite is 12,600 miles (20,300 kilometers) above Earth and moves at about 6,000 mph (10,000 km/h), there's a relativistic time dilation that tacks on about 4 microseconds each day. Add in the effects of gravity, and the time dilation effect goes up to about 7 microseconds (millionths of a second).

The difference is very real: If no relativistic effects were accounted for, a GPS unit that tells you it's a half mile (0.8 km) to the next gas station would be 5 miles (8 km) off after only one day, according to Physics Central.

Gold's yellow color

Most metals are shiny because the electrons in the atoms jump from different energy levels, or "orbitals." Some photons that hit the metal get absorbed and reemitted, though at a longer wavelength. However, most visible light gets reflected.

Gold is a heavy element, so the inner electrons move fast enough that the relativistic mass increase and the length contraction are significant, according to a statement from Heidelberg University in Germany. As a result, the electrons spin around the nucleus in shorter paths, with more momentum. Electrons in the inner orbitals carry energy that is closer to the energy of outer electrons, and the wavelengths that get absorbed and reflected are longer. Longer wavelengths of light mean that some of the visible light that would usually be reflected gets absorbed, and that light is on the blue end of the spectrum. White light is a mix of all the colors of the rainbow, but in gold's case, when light gets absorbed and reemitted, the wavelengths are usually longer. That means the mix of light waves we see tends to have less blue and violet in it. Because yellow, orange and red light are  longer wavelengths than blue light,  gold appears yellowish, according to the BBC.

Gold's resistance to corrosion

The relativistic effect on gold's electrons is also one reason it doesn't corrode or easily react with anything else, according to a 1998 paper in the journal Gold Bulletin.

Gold has only one electron in its outer shell, but it still is not as reactive as calcium or lithium. Instead, because the electrons in gold are "heavier" than they should be, since they are moving near the speed of light, increasing their mass, they are held closer to the atomic nucleus. This means that the outermost electron isn't likely to be where it can react with anything at all; it's just as likely to be among the electrons that are close to the nucleus.

Liquid mercury

Mercury is also a heavy atom, with electrons held close to the nucleus because of their speed and consequent mass increase. The bonds between mercury atoms are weak, so mercury melts at lower temperatures and is typically a liquid when we see it, according to Chemistry World.

Your old TV

Until about the early 2000s, most televisions and monitors had cathode ray tube screens. A cathode ray tube works by firing electrons at a phosphor surface with a big magnet. Each electron makes a lighted pixel when it hits the back of the screen, and the electrons fire out to make the picture move at up to 30% the speed of light. Relativistic effects are noticeable, and when manufacturers shaped the magnets, they had to consider those effects, according to PBS News Hour.

Light

Isaac Newton assumed that there is an absolute rest frame, or an external perfect frame of reference that we could compare all other frames of reference against. If he had been right, we would have to come up with a different explanation for light, because it wouldn't happen at all.

"Not only would magnetism not exist, but light would also not exist, because relativity requires that changes in an electromagnetic field move at a finite speed instead of instantaneously," Moore said. "If relativity did not enforce this requirement … changes in electric fields would be communicated instantaneously … instead of through electromagnetic waves, and both magnetism and light would be unnecessary."

The sun

Without Einstein's most famous equation — E = mc^2 — the sun and the rest of the stars wouldn't shine. In the center of our parent star, intense temperatures and pressures constantly squeeze four separate hydrogen atoms into a single helium atom, according to Ohio State University. The mass of a single helium atom is just slightly less than that of four hydrogen atoms. What happens to the extra mass? It gets directly converted into energy, which shows up as sunlight on our planet.

Additional resources

• Learn more about how relativity affects the study of distant cosmic objects, from NASA.
• See how relativity becomes important for particle accelerators, from Fermilab.
• Explore a history of Einstein's theory of relativity and its many confirmed predictions, from the European Space Agency.

Electromagnetic radiation is a type of energy that is all around us and takes many forms, such as radio waves, microwaves, X-rays and gamma-rays. Sunlight is also a form of electromagnetic energy, but visible light is only a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, which contains a broad range of wavelengths.

When was electromagnetism discovered?

People have known about electricity and magnetism since ancient times, but the concepts were not well understood until the 19th century, according to a history from physicist Gary Bedrosian of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. In 1873, Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell showed that the two phenomena were connected and developed a unified theory of electromagnetism, according to Live Science sister site Space.com. The study of electromagnetism deals with how electrically charged particles interact with each other and with magnetic fields.

Maxwell developed a set of formulas, called Maxwell's equations, to describe the different interactions of electricity and magnetism. Though there were initially 20 equations, Maxwell later simplified them to just four basic ones. In simple terms, these four equations state the following:

• The force of attraction or repulsion between electric charges is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
• Magnetic poles come in pairs that attract and repel each other, much as electric charges do.
• An electric current in a wire produces a magnetic field whose direction depends on the direction of the current.
• A moving electric field produces a magnetic field, and vice versa.

How is electromagnetism created?

Electromagnetic radiation is created when a charged atomic particle, such as an electron, is accelerated by an electric field, causing it to move. The movement produces oscillating electric and magnetic fields, which travel at right angles to each other, according to an online physics and astronomy course from PhysLink.com. The waves have certain characteristics, given as frequency, wavelength or energy.

A wavelength is the distance between two consecutive peaks of a wave, according to the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). This distance is given in meters or fractions thereof. Frequency is the number of waves that form in a given length of time. It is usually measured as the number of wave cycles per second, or hertz (Hz). A short wavelength means that the frequency will be higher because one cycle can pass in a shorter amount of time. Similarly, a longer wavelength has a lower frequency because each cycle takes longer to complete.

What are the parts of the electromagnetic spectrum?

Electromagnetic radiation spans an enormous range of wavelengths and frequencies. This range is known as the electromagnetic spectrum, according to UCAR. The electromagnetic spectrum is generally divided into seven regions, in order of decreasing wavelength and increasing energy and frequency. The common designations are radio waves, microwaves, infrared (IR), visible light, ultraviolet (UV) light, X-rays and gamma-rays.

Radio waves

Radio waves are at the lowest range of the electromagnetic spectrum, with frequencies of up to about 30 billion hertz, or 30 gigahertz (GHz), and wavelengths greater than about 0.4 inch (10 millimeters). Radio is used primarily for communications, including voice, data and entertainment media.

Microwaves

Microwaves fall in the range of the electromagnetic spectrum between radio and IR. They have frequencies from about 3 GHz to 30 trillion hertz, or 30 terahertz (THz), and wavelengths of about 0.004 to 0.4 inch (0.1 to 10 mm). Microwaves are used for high-bandwidth communications and radar, as well as for a heat source for microwave ovens and industrial applications.

Infrared

Infrared is in the range of the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and visible light. IR has frequencies from about 30 to 400 THz and wavelengths of about 0.00003 to 0.004 inch (740 nanometers to 100 micrometers). IR light is invisible to human eyes, but we can feel it as heat if the intensity is sufficient.

Visible light

Visible light is found in the middle of the electromagnetic spectrum, between IR and UV. It has frequencies of about 400 to 800 THz and wavelengths of about 0.000015 to 0.00003 inch (380 to 740 nanometers). More generally, visible light is defined as the wavelengths that are visible to most human eyes.

Ultraviolet

Ultraviolet light is the range of the electromagnetic spectrum between visible light and X-rays. It has frequencies of about 8 × 10¹⁴ to 3 x 10¹⁶ Hz and wavelengths of about 0.0000004 to 0.000015 inch (10 to 380 nanometers). UV light is a component of sunlight, but it is invisible to the human eye. It has numerous medical and industrial applications, but it can damage living tissue.

X-rays

X-rays are roughly classified into two types: soft X-rays and hard X-rays. Soft X-rays make up the range of the electromagnetic spectrum between UV and gamma-rays. Soft X-rays have frequencies of about 3 × 10¹⁶ to 10¹⁸ Hz and wavelengths of about 4 × 10⁻⁷ to 4 × 10⁻⁸ inch (100 picometers to 10 nanometers). Hard X-rays occupy the same region of the electromagnetic spectrum as gamma-rays. The only difference between them is their source: X-rays are produced by accelerating electrons, while gamma-rays are produced by atomic nuclei.

Gamma-rays

Gamma-rays are in the range of the spectrum above soft X-rays. Gamma-rays have frequencies greater than about 10¹⁸ Hz and wavelengths of less than 4 × 10⁻⁹ inch (100 picometers). Gamma radiation causes damage to living tissue, which makes it useful for killing cancer cells when applied in carefully measured doses to small regions. Uncontrolled exposure, though, is extremely dangerous to humans.

This article was updated on March 17, 2022, by Live Science contributor Adam Mann.

Additional resources

• Explore the electromagnetic spectrum further with this interactive page from NASA.
• Convert between wavelength and frequency and learn the size of different electromagnetic waves with this calculator from HyperPhysics, a website hosted by Georgia State University.
• Read James Clerk Maxwell's groundbreaking 1873 treatise on electricity and magnetism online.

Bibliography

Sutter, P. (2021, September 29). Who was James Clerk Maxwell? The greatest physicist you've probably never heard of. Space.com. https://www.space.com/who-was-james-clerk-maxwell-physicist  

University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, Center for Science Education. (2017). Electromagnetic (EM) spectrum. https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/atmosphere/electromagnetic-spectrum  

University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, Center for Science Education. (2018). Wavelength. https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/atmosphere/wavelength  

Walorski, P. (n.d.). Why is that electrons radiate electromagnetic energy when they are accelerated? PhysLink.com. Retrieved March 17, 2022, from https://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae436.cfm  

Magnetism is a force of nature produced by moving electric charges. Sometimes these motions are microscopic and inside of a material known as magnets. Magnets, or the magnetic fields created by moving electric charges, can attract or repel other magnets, and change the motion of other charged particles.

A magnetic field exerts a force on particles known as the Lorentz force, according to Georgia State University's HyperPhysics website. The force acting on an electrically charged particle in a magnetic field depends on the magnitude of the charge, the velocity of the particle, and the strength of the magnetic field. The Lorentz force has the peculiar property that it causes particles to move in right angles to their original motion.

Some materials, such as iron, are known as permanent magnets, which means that they can sustain a permanent magnetic field. These are the most common forms of magnets encountered in everyday life. Other materials, such as iron, cobalt and nickel, can be given a temporary magnetic field by placing them inside of a larger, powerful field, but eventually those materials will lose their magnetism.

How magnetism works

Magnetic fields are generated by the motion of electric charges, according to HyperPhysics. Electrons all have a fundamental quantum mechanical property of angular momentum, known as "spin." Inside atoms, most electrons tend to form pairs in which one of them is "spin up" and the other is "spin down," or in other words their angular momenta point in opposite directions. In this case, the magnetic fields created by those spins point in opposite directions, so they cancel each other. However, some atoms contain one or more unpaired electrons, and these unpaired electrons create a tiny magnetic field. The direction of their spin determines the direction of the magnetic field, according to the Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) Resource Center. When a significant majority of unpaired electrons are aligned with their spins in the same direction, they combine to produce a magnetic field that is strong enough to be observed on a macroscopic scale. 

Magnetic field sources are dipolar, meaning that they have a north and south pole. Opposite poles (N and S) attract, and like poles (N and N, or S and S) repel, according to Joseph Becker of San Jose State University. This creates a toroidal, or doughnut-shaped field, as the direction of the field propagates outward from the north pole and enters through the south pole. 

Earth itself is a giant magnet. The planet gets its magnetic field from circulating electric current within the molten metallic core, according to NASA. A compass points north because the small magnetic needle in it is suspended so that it can spin freely inside its casing to align itself with Earth's magnetic field. Paradoxically, what we call the Magnetic North Pole is actually a south magnetic pole because it attracts the north magnetic poles of compass needles.

History of magnetism

If the alignment of unpaired electrons persists without the application of an external magnetic field or electric current, it produces a permanent magnet. Permanent magnets are the result of ferromagnetism. The prefix "ferro" refers to iron because permanent magnetism was first observed in a form of natural iron ore called magnetite, Fe3O4. Pieces of magnetite can be found scattered on or near the surface of the Earth, and occasionally, one will be magnetized. These naturally occurring magnets are called lodestones. While scientists don't know exactly how lodestones form, "most scientists believe that lodestone is magnetite that has been hit by lightning," according to the University of Arizona. 

People soon learned that they could magnetize an iron needle by stroking it with a lodestone, causing a majority of the unpaired electrons in the needle to line up in one direction. According to NASA, around A.D. 1000, the Chinese discovered that a magnet floating in a bowl of water always lined up in the north-south direction. Thereafter, the magnetic compass became a tremendous aid to navigation, particularly during the day and on nights when the stars were hidden by clouds. 

Other metals besides iron can have ferromagnetic properties. These include nickel, cobalt, and some rare earth metals such as samarium or neodymium, which are used to make super-strong permanent magnets.

Other forms of magnetism

Magnetism takes many other forms, but except for ferromagnetism, they are usually too weak to be observed except by sensitive laboratory instruments or at very low temperatures. Anton Brugnams first discovered diamagnetism in 1778 while using permanent magnets in his search for materials containing iron. According to Gerald Küstler, a widely published independent German researcher and inventor, in his paper, "Diamagnetic Levitation — Historical Milestones," published in the Romanian Journal of Technical Sciences, Brugnams observed, "Only the dark and almost violet-colored bismuth displayed a particular phenomenon in the study; for when I laid a piece of it upon a round sheet of paper floating atop water, it was repelled by both poles of the magnet."

Diamagnetism is caused by the orbital motion of electrons within atoms creating tiny current loops, which produce weak magnetic fields, according to HyperPhysics. When an external magnetic field is applied to a material, these current loops tend to align in such a way as to oppose the applied field. This causes all materials to be repelled by a permanent magnet; however, the resulting force is usually too weak to be noticeable. There are, however, some notable exceptions.

Pyrolytic carbon, a substance similar to graphite, shows even stronger diamagnetism than bismuth, albeit only along one axis, and can actually be levitated above a super-strong rare earth magnet. Certain superconducting materials show even stronger diamagnetism below their critical temperature (the temperature at which they become superconducting) and so rare-earth magnets can be levitated above them. (In theory, because of their mutual repulsion, one can be levitated above the other.)

Paramagnetism occurs when a material becomes magnetic temporarily when placed in a magnetic field and reverts to its nonmagnetic state as soon as the external field is removed. When a magnetic field is applied, some of the unpaired electron spins align themselves with the field and overwhelm the opposite force produced by diamagnetism. However, the effect is only noticeable at very low temperatures, said Daniel Marsh, a professor of physics at Missouri Southern State University.

Other, more complex, forms include antiferromagnetism, in which the magnetic fields of atoms or molecules align next to each other; and spin glass behavior, which involve both ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic interactions. Additionally, ferrimagnetism can be thought of as a combination of ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism due to many similarities shared among them, but it still has its own uniqueness, according to the University of California, Davis.

Electricity and magnetism

When a conducting wire is moved in a magnetic field, the field induces a current in the wire. Conversely, a magnetic field is produced by an electric charge in motion, such as when a wire is carrying a current. So all the electric wires in your household produce tiny magnetic fields. This relationship between electricity and magnetism is described by Faraday's Law of Induction, which is the basis for electromagnets, electric motors and generators. A charge moving in a straight line, as through a straight wire, generates a magnetic field that spirals around the wire. When that wire is formed into a loop, the field becomes a doughnut shape, or a torus. 

Direct current can also produce a constant field in one direction that can be switched on and off with the current. This field can then deflect a movable iron lever causing an audible click. This is the basis for the telegraph, invented in the 1830s by Samuel F. B. Morse, which allowed for long-distance communication over wires using a binary code based on long- and short-duration pulses, according to the Library of Congress. Skilled operators sent the pulses by quickly turning the current on and off using a spring-loaded momentary-contact switch, or key. Another operator on the receiving end would then translate the audible clicks back into letters and words. 

A coil around a magnet can also be made to move in a pattern of varying frequency and amplitude to induce a current in a coil. This is the basis for a number of devices, most notably, the microphone. Sound causes a diaphragm to move in and out with the varying pressure waves. If the diaphragm is connected to a movable magnetic coil around a magnetic core, it will produce a varying current that is analogous to the incident sound waves. This electrical signal can then be amplified, recorded or transmitted as desired. Tiny super-strong rare-earth magnets are used to make miniaturized microphones for cell phones, Marsh told Live Science. 

When this modulated electrical signal is applied to a coil, it produces an oscillating magnetic field, which causes the coil to move in and out over a magnetic core in that same pattern. The coil is then attached to a movable speaker cone so it can reproduce audible sound waves in the air. The first practical application for the microphone and speaker was the telephone, patented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, according to the Smithsonian Institution. Although this technology has been improved and refined, it is still the basis for recording and reproducing sound. 

The applications of electromagnets are nearly countless. Faraday's Law of Induction forms the basis for many aspects of our modern society including not only electric motors and generators, but electromagnets of all sizes. The same principle used by a giant crane to lift junk cars at a scrap yard is also used to align microscopic magnetic particles on a computer hard disk drive to store binary data, and new applications are being developed every day.

Staff Writer Tanya Lewis contributed to this report.

Additional resources

• The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory is the largest and highest-powered magnet laboratory in the world. Researchers use the facilities for free to study materials, energy and life.
• The Internet Plasma Physics Education Experience has an interactive module about the basic concepts involved with Electricity and Magnetism.
• NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center features these lessons on the "Early History of Electricity and Magnetism" and "The Exploration of the Earth's Magnetosphere."

Bibliography

NASA, "Earth's Magnetosphere", https://www.nasa.gov/magnetosphere

"Magnetism." DISCovering Science. Gale Research, 1996. Reproduced in Discovering Collection. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale Group. December, 2000. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/DC/

Griffiths, David J. (1998). Introduction to Electrodynamics (3rd ed.). Prentice Hall. ISBN 978-0-13-805326-0. OCLC 40251748.

A dense, magnetic star violently erupted and spat out as much energy as a billion suns — and it happened in a fraction of a second, scientists recently reported.

This type of star, known as a magnetar, is a neutron star with an exceptionally strong magnetic field, and magnetars often flare spectacularly and without warning. But even though magnetars can be thousands of times brighter than our sun, their eruptions are so brief and unpredictable that they're challenging for astrophysicists to find and study.

However, researchers recently managed to catch one of these flares and calculate oscillations in the brightness of a magnetar as it erupted. The scientists found that the distant magnetar released as much energy as our sun produces in 100,000 years, and it did so in just 1/10 of a second, according to a statement translated from Spanish.

Related: The 12 strangest objects in the universe

A neutron star forms when a massive star collapses at the end of its life. As the star dies in a supernova, protons and electrons in its core are crushed into a compressed solar mass that combines intense gravity with high-speed rotation and powerful magnetic forces, according to NASA. The result, a neutron star, is approximately 1.3 to 2.5 solar masses — one solar mass is the mass of our sun, or about 330,000 Earths — crammed into a sphere measuring just 12 miles (20 kilometers) in diameter. 

Matter in neutron stars is so densely packed that an amount the size of a sugar cube would weigh more than 1 billion tons (900 million metric tons), and a neutron star's gravitational pull is so intense that a passing marshmallow would hit the star's surface with the force of 1,000 hydrogen bombs, according to NASA.

Magnetars are neutron stars with magnetic fields that are 1,000 times stronger than those of other neutron stars, and they are more powerful than any other magnetic object in the universe. Our sun pales in comparison to these bright, dense stars even when they aren't erupting, study lead author Alberto J. Castro-Tirado, a research professor with the Institute for Astrophysics of Andalucía at the Spanish Research Council, said in the statement.

"Even in an inactive state, magnetars can be 100,000 times more luminous than our sun," Castro-Tirado said. "But in the case of the flash that we have studied — GRB2001415 — the energy that was released is equivalent to that which our sun radiates in 100,000 years."

A "giant flare"

The magnetar that produced the brief eruption is located in the Sculptor Galaxy, a spiral galaxy about 13 million light-years from Earth, and is "a true cosmic monster," study co-author Victor Reglero, director of UV's Image Processing Laboratory, said in the statement. The giant flare was detected on April 15, 2020 by the Atmosphere–Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) instrument on the International Space Station, researchers reported Dec. 22 in the journal Nature.

Artificial intelligence (AI) in the ASIM pipeline detected the flare, enabling the researchers to analyze that brief, violent energy surge; the flare lasted just 0.16 seconds and then the signal decayed so rapidly that it was nearly indistinguishable from background noise in the data. The study authors spent more than a year analyzing ASIM's two seconds of data collection, dividing the event into four phases based on the magnetar's energy output, and then measuring variations in the star's magnetic field caused by the energy pulse when it was at its peak. 

It's almost as if the magnetar decided to broadcast its existence "from its cosmic solitude" by shouting into the void of space with the force "of a billion suns," Reglero said.

Only about 30 magnetars have been identified from approximately 3,000 known neutron stars, and this is the most distant magnetar flare detected to date. Scientists suspect that eruptions such as this one may be caused by so-called starquakes that disrupt magnetars' elastic outer layers, and this rare observation could help researchers unravel the stresses that produce magnetars' energy burps, according to the study.

Originally published on Live Science.

Physicists have created the first-ever atomic vortex beam — a swirling tornado of atoms and molecules with mysterious properties that have yet to be understood.

By sending a straight beam of helium atoms through a grating with teeny slits, scientists were able to use the weird rules of quantum mechanics to transform the beam into a whirling vortex.

The extra gusto provided by the beam's rotation, called orbital angular momentum, gives it a new direction to move in, enabling it to act in ways that researchers have yet to predict. For instance, they believe the atoms' rotation could add extra dimensions of magnetism to the beam, alongside other unpredictable effects, due to the electrons and the nuclei inside the spiraling vortex atoms spinning at different speeds.

Related: The 18 biggest unsolved mysteries in physics

"One possibility is that this could also change the magnetic moment of the atom," or the intrinsic magnetism of a particle that makes it act like a tiny bar magnet, study co-author Yair Segev, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, told Live Science. 

In the simplified, classical picture of the atom, negatively-charged electrons orbit a positively-charged atomic nucleus. In this view, Segev said that as the atoms spin as a whole, the electrons inside the vortex would rotate at a faster speed than the nuclei, "creating different opposing [electrical] currents" as they twist. This could, according to the famous law of magnetic induction outlined by Michael Faraday, produce all kinds of new magnetic effects, such as magnetic moments that point through the center of the beam and out of the atoms themselves, alongside more effects that they cannot predict.

The researchers created the beam by sending helium atoms through a grid of tiny slits each just 600 nanometers across. In the realm of quantum mechanics — the set of rules which govern the world of the very small — atoms can behave both like particles and tiny waves; as such, the beam of wave-like helium atoms diffracted through the grid, bending so much that they emerged as a vortex that corkscrewed its way through space. 

The whirling atoms then arrived at a detector, which showed multiple beams — diffracted to differing extents to have varying angular momentums — as tiny little doughnut-like rings imprinted across it. The scientists also spotted even smaller, brighter doughnut rings wedged inside the central three swirls. These are the telltale signs of helium excimers — a molecule formed when one energetically excited helium atom sticks to another helium atom. (Normally, helium is a noble gas and doesn't bind with anything.)

The orbital angular momentum given to atoms inside the spiraling beam also changes the quantum mechanical "selection rules" that determine how the swirling atoms will interact with other particles, Segev said. Next, the researchers will smash their helium beams into photons, electrons and atoms of elements besides helium to see how they might behave.

If their rotating beam does indeed act differently, it could become an ideal candidate for a new type of microscope that can peer into undiscovered details on the subatomic level. The beam could, according to Segev, give us more information on some surfaces by changing the image that is imprinted upon the beam atoms bounced off it.

"I think that as is often the case in science, it's not a leap of capability that leads to something new, but rather a change in perspective," Segev said.

The researchers published their findings Sept. 3 in the journal Science.

Originally published on Live Science.

Deep in its searing hot belly, the giant red star Betelgeuse could be producing tons of hypothetical dark matter particles called axions that, if they exist, would give off a telltale signal. A recent search for such a tantalizing emission has turned up empty, but helps physicists place new limits on the putative axion’s properties. 

Appearing as a bright red dot in the constellation Orion, Betelgeuse is a well-studied star. It is cosmologically close, being only 520 light-years from Earth, and made headlines last year when it started mysteriously dimming, leading some researchers to believe it could be preparing to explode as a supernova. 

Because it is such a large and hot star, Betelgeuse might also be a perfect place to find axions, scientists say. These conjectured particles could have perhaps a millionth or even a billionth the mass of an electron and are ideal candidates to make up dark matter, the mysterious substance vastly outweighing ordinary matter in the universe but whose nature is still largely undetermined.

Related: 15 unforgettable images of stars

As dark matter, axions shouldn’t interact much with luminous particles, but according to some theories, there is a small probability that photons, or light particles, could convert back and forth into axions in the presence of a strong magnetic field, Mengjiao Xiao, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, told Live Science. 

The thermonuclear core of a star is a good place to find copious amounts of both photons and magnetism, and Betelgeuse, which has 20 times the mass of the sun, could conceivably be “what we call an axion factory,” he said.

If axions are produced in this extreme environment, they should be able to escape outwards and stream towards Earth in large numbers. By interacting with the Milky Way galaxy’s natural magnetic field, these axions could be converted back into photons in the X-ray part of the electromagnetic spectrum, Xiao said. 

As an elderly star, Betelgeuse is in a life stage where it shouldn’t be emitting much X-ray light, he added, so any such radiation detected from it might indicate the presence of axions. 

Xiao and his colleagues used NASA’s space-based Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) to hunt for an X-ray signature coming from Betelgeuse, though they saw nothing beyond what was expected from ordinary astrophysical processes such as the small amount of X-rays that Betegeuse is making. Their findings, which Xiao will present on April 20 at the American Physical Society’s April meeting, suggest that photons and axions are at least three times less likely to interact than previously believed.  

Because stellar environments are much noisier than conditions found in a lab, doing searches such as this are tricky, said Joshua Foster, a physicist at MIT who was not involved in the work but who has been part of an effort to look for axions coming from the star clusters near our galaxy’s center. But the team worked hard to quantify their uncertainties and helped put new constraints on the axion’s potential properties, Foster told Live Science. 

Even if researchers saw unexpected X-rays coming from a star, it wouldn’t necessarily indicate that axions are real. Scientists would still have to rule out many non-dark-matter explanations for the signal before turning to new physics, Foster said. 

But it’s possible that axions, should they one day be found, could help astronomers better understand Betelgeuse, Xiao said. If the particles’ properties were known, telescopes trained on Betelgeuse might be able to finally pick up their signal, giving insights into processes happening in its belly and enabling researchers to calculate when it will actually explode, he added. 

Originally published on Live Science.

Capturing lightning in a bottle is the very definition of a tough task, but now physicists have found a way to contain ultracold plasma in a magnetic bottle trap, a breakthrough that could bring physicists one step closer to understanding solar winds and achieving nuclear fusion.

Plasma is one of the four states of matter, consisting of positive ions and negative free electrons. But unlike solids, liquids and gases, its tendency to occur in only the most extreme places, such as in the streak of ionized air we call a lightning bolt, in the dancing pattern of the aurora borealis, or on the surface of the sun, makes it extremely difficult to study.

This difficulty is only worsened by the fact that the plasmas in the Northern Lights or on the sun's surface interact with a complex magnetic field in ways scientists have yet to fully understand.

Related: 9 cool facts about magnets

"Throughout the sun's atmosphere, the (strong) magnetic field has the effect of altering everything relative to what you would expect without a magnetic field, but in very subtle and complicated ways that can really trip you up if you don't have a really good understanding of it," study co-author Peter Bradshaw, an astrophysicist at Rice University in Houston, said in a statement.

Colder particles move slower, allowing much more precise measurements of their behavior. In order to figure out how plasmas interact with magnetic fields, the scientists cooled their plasma, made of strontium, down to about 1 degree above absolute zero (around minus 272 degrees Celsius) using a technique called laser-cooling. 

You'd think that firing a laser at something would heat it up, but if the photons (light particles) in the laser beam are traveling in the opposite direction of the moving plasma particles, they can actually cause those plasma particles to slow and cool them down. 

Once the plasma was cooled, the researchers trapped it momentarily with forces from surrounding magnets, allowing them to study it before it dissipated. They then set out to disentangle the interaction between the ions and electrons of the plasma and the magnetic field, which varies greatly across the plasma. The interaction was so complex that it took them a year to fully interpret their data.

"We measure plasma properties by scattering light off the ions in the plasma, but the magnetic field really complicates that," Rice Dean of Natural Sciences and corresponding author Tom Killian told Live Science. This is because the magnetic field changes how the ions scatter the laser light in very unpredictable ways.

"On top of that, the magnetic field is varying in space all across the plasma,” said Killian. “We had to sort out all of those effects." to paint a picture of the plasma density and speed across the bottle over time.

The picture they revealed was one where the fast-moving, low-mass electrons were tightly pinned to the magnetic field lines and spiraling around them, with the positive ions held inside the trap by their attraction to the negatively charged electrons. The paper's authors speculate that the magnetic field kept the electrons and ions from combining to form neutral atoms, and so kept the soup trapped in its plasma state.

The trapping technique opens up a wide range of avenues for plasma research. If physicists can capture ultra-cold plasma in a bottle, they can study the behavior of plasma-composed stellar objects like white dwarfs, or begin to replicate the conditions for fusion inside the sun.

Next, the researchers said they will design a laser grid that will plug any holes in the bottle's magnetic field through which ions could escape the experiment. They also hope to further investigate the processes that occur inside the trapped plasma, such as how the ions and electrons could recombine or how energy and mass move through the system.

"Our new abilities may give a great opportunity to study those phenomena," Killian said. "Similar effects are probably important for understanding some other systems that are hard to do experiments on, like white dwarf stars."

Originally published on Live Science.

Carnivorous plants known as Venus flytraps (Dionaea muscipula) lure insects between their blushing leaves with a fragrant nectar. When these insect-hungry plants snap down on their unassuming prey, they generate a measurable magnetic field, according to a new study.

The plant's magnetic field is more than a million times weaker than Earth's. Rather than serving a function for the plant this magnetic field is likely a byproduct of electrical energy that flows through its leaves, said lead author Anne Fabricant, a doctoral candidate at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the Helmholtz Institute Mainz in Germany. Still, it's one of the first such fields ever detected in plants. 

"Wherever there is electrical activity, there should also be magnetic activity," Fabricant told Live Science. The laws of electromagnetism dictate that anything with an electrical current also generates a magnetic field; and that includes humans, animals and plants. In fact, it's such a common phenomenon among living things that there's a name associated with it: biomagnetism. But while much research focused on such magnetic fields in humans and animals, not much has been done to understand biomagnetism in the plant world.

Related: Image gallery: carnivorous plants

In the new study, Fabricant and her team used tiny glass sensors called "atomic magnetometers" that contain a vapor of atoms that are sensitive to magnetic fields, according to a statement. They then triggered electrical energy, in the form of an action potential, to flow through the Venus flytrap. Action potentials, which also occur in animal and human nervous systems, are bursts of electrical energy that allow cells to communicate.

Action potentials serve a "vital" function for the Venus flytrap, triggering the plant to close its leaves around insects that touch sensitive hairs on the plants' leaves, Fabricant said.

But the researchers stimulated the plant in another way, by using heat. They found that when stimulated, the Venus flytrap created a magnetic field up to a strength of 0.5 picotesla. That's  similar to the levels generated by nerve impulses in animals, according to the statement.

Magnetic fields have only been detected in two other plants prior to this study, a single-cell algae and a bean plant, Fabricant said. But those were measured using superconducting-quantum-interference-device (SQUID) magnetometers, which are just as bulky as their name and need to be cooled to extremely low temperatures, she said.

"It's exciting to demonstrate plant-biomagnetic measurements using atomic magnetometers, which operate at room temperature and can be portable and miniaturized," Fabricant said. "The fact that we were able to detect magnetic fields gives some hints about how electric currents are distributed in the trap." The researchers hope to measure even tinier magnetic fields in other plant species, according to the statement. 

The findings were published Jan. 14 in the journal Scientific Reports.

Originally published on Live Science.

The fifth generation of cellular technology, 5G, is the next leap in speed for wireless devices. This speed includes both the rate mobile users can download data to their devices and the latency, or lag, they experience between sending and receiving information.

5G aims to deliver data rates that are 10 to 100 times faster than current 4G networks. Users should expect to see download speeds on the order of gigabits per second (Gb/s), rather than the tens of megabits per second (Mb/s) speeds of 4G.

"That's significant because it will enable new applications that are just not possible today," said Harish Krishnaswamy, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University in New York. "Just for an example, at gigabits per second data rates, you could potentially download a movie to your phone or tablet in a matter of seconds. Those type of data rates could enable virtual reality applications or autonomous driving cars."

Apart from requiring high data rates, emerging technologies that interact with the user's environment like augmented reality or self-driving cars will also require extremely low latency. For that reason, the goal of 5G is to achieve latencies below the 1-millisecond mark. Mobile devices will be able to send and receive information in less than one-thousandth of a second, appearing instantaneous to the user. To accomplish these speeds, the rollout of 5G requires new technology and infrastructure.

The new network

Since the earliest generation of mobile phones, wireless networks have operated on the same radio-frequency bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. But as more users crowd the network and demand more data than ever before, these radio-wave highways become increasingly congested with cellular traffic. To compensate, cellular providers want to expand into the higher frequencies of millimeter waves.

Millimeter waves use frequencies from 30 to 300 gigahertz, which are 10 to 100 times higher than the radio waves used today for 4G and WiFi networks. They're called millimeter because their wavelengths vary between 1 and 10 millimeters, where as radio waves are on the order of centimeters.

The higher frequency of millimeter waves may create new lanes on the communication highway, but there's one problem: Millimeter waves are easily absorbed by foliage and buildings and will require many closely spaced base stations, called small cells. Fortunately, these stations are much smaller and require less power than traditional cell towers. They can be placed atop buildings and light poles.

The miniaturization of base stations also enables another technological breakthrough for 5G: Massive MIMO. MIMO stands for multiple-input multiple-output, and refers to a configuration that takes advantage of the smaller antennas needed for millimeter waves by dramatically increasing the number of antenna ports in each base station.

"With a massive amount of antennas — tens to hundreds of antennas at each base station — you can serve many different users at the same, increasing the data rate," Krishnaswamy said. At the Columbia high-Speed and Millimeter-wave IC (COSMIC) lab, Krishnaswamy and his team designed chips that enable both millimeter wave and  MIMO technologies. "Millimeter-wave and massive MIMO are the two biggest technologies 5G will use to deliver the higher data rates and lower latency we expect to see."

Is 5G dangerous?

Although 5G may improve our day to day lives, some consumers have voiced concern about potential health hazards. Many of these concerns are over 5G's use of the higher energy millimeter-wave radiation, which experts say is no cause for worry.

"There's often confusion between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation because the term radiation is used for both," said Kenneth Foster, a professor of bioengineering at Pennsylvania State University. "All light is radiation because it is simply energy moving through space. It's ionizing radiation that is dangerous because it can break chemical bonds."

Ionizing radiation is the reason we wear sunscreen outside because short-wavelength ultraviolet light from the sky has enough energy to knock electrons from their atoms, damaging skin cells and DNA. Millimeter waves, on the other hand, are non-ionizing because they have longer wavelengths and not enough energy to damage cells directly.

"The only established hazard of non-ionizing radiation is too much heating," Foster said, who has studied the health effects of radio waves for nearly 50 years. "At high exposure levels, radio frequency (RF) energy can indeed be hazardous, producing burns or other thermal damage, but these exposures are typically incurred only in occupational settings near high-powered radio frequency transmitters, or sometimes in medical procedures gone awry."

Many of the public's outcries over the adoption of 5G echo concerns over previous generations of cellular technology. Skeptics believe exposure to non-ionizing radiation may still be responsible for a range of illnesses, from brain tumors to chronic headaches. Over the years, there have been thousands of studies investigating these concerns.

In 2018, the National Toxicology Program released a decade-long study that found some evidence of an increase in brain and adrenal gland tumors in male rats exposed to the RF radiation emitted by 2G and 3G cellphones, but not in mice or female rats. The animals were exposed to levels of radiation four times higher than the maximum level permitted for human exposure.

According to Foster, many opponents to the use of RF waves cherry-pick studies that support their argument, and often ignore the quality of the experimental methods or inconsistency of the results. Although he disagrees with many of the conclusions skeptics have about previous generations of cellular networks, Foster agrees that we need more studies on the potential health effects of 5G networks.

"Everyone I know, including me, is recommending more research on 5G because there's not a lot of toxicology studies with this technology," Foster said.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) allowed the rollout of 5G wireless networks in 2019 without changing any prior federal safety limits for RF exposure. That agency, following guidance from the World Health Organization and the US Food and Drug Administration, saw nothing unique in 5G technology that could necessitate additional caution on top of existing guidelines that the FCC says already incorporate a significant safety margin.

For the proponents of 5G, many believe the benefits 5G can provide to society far outweigh the unknowns.

"I think 5G will have a transformational impact on our lives and enable fundamentally new things," Krishnaswamy said. "What those types of applications will be and what that impact is, we can't say for sure right now. It could be something that takes us by surprise and really changes something for society. If history has taught us anything, then 5G will be another example of what wireless can do for us."

Additional resources:

• Learn more about previous generations of cellphones and why 5G is the next step.
• What do other health experts have to say about cellphone usage?
• Find out if 5G is available in your area.

This article was updated on Feb. 1, 2021 by LiveScience Reference Editor Vicky Stein.

Scientists have figured out a way to create and cancel magnetic fields from afar. 

The method involves running electric current through a special arrangement of wires to create a magnetic field that looks as if it came from another source. This illusion has real applications: Imagine a cancer drug that could be delivered directly to a tumor deep in the body by capsules made of magnetic nanoparticles. It's not possible to stick a magnet in the tumor to guide the nanoparticles on their journey, but if you could create a magnetic field from outside the body that centered right on that tumor, you could deliver the drug without an invasive procedure. 

The strength of a magnetic field decreases with distance from the magnet, and a theorem proven in 1842, Earnshaw's Theorem, says that it's not possible to create a spot of maximum magnetic field strength in empty space.

"If you cannot have a magnetic field maxima in empty space, it means you cannot create the field of a magnetic source remotely, without placing an actual [magnetic] source at the target location," said Rosa Mach-Batlle, a physicist at the Istituto Italiano Di Tecnologia Center for Biomolecular Nanotechnologies in Italy who led the new research. 

Related: 9 cool facts about magnets

Making the hypothetical real

Mach-Batlle and her colleagues, though, thought they might be able to get around that problem. They were inspired by work in optics that uses engineered materials known as metamaterials (designed to have properties not found in any naturally-occuring material) to get around limits on resolution set by the wavelength of light. Similarly, they thought, hypothetical magnetic materials might enable the impossible in the world of magnetic fields. 

The researchers envisioned a material with a magnetic permeability of negative 1. A material's magnetic permeability indicates how much that material increases or decreases a magnetic field when exposed to that field. In a material with a magnetic permeability of negative 1, the direction of the magnetism induced within the material would be the opposite of the direction of the initial magnetic field. 

Of course, a new method of inducing magnetic fields that relied on materials that don't exist wouldn't be particularly useful. But even though this hypothetical material with negative permeability doesn't exist, physicists can create a sort of temporary "material" out of electric current running through a specific arrangement of wires. That's because current induces magnetism and vice versa, a consequence of Maxwell's Equations of electromagnetism.

Related: Black hole-sized magnetic fields could be created on Earth, study says

"In the end, we do not use any material, we use a precise arrangement of currents that can be regarded as an active metamaterial," Mach-Batlle told Live Science. 

To create the field from a distance, Mach-Batlle and her team created a hollow cylinder made of about 20 wires surrounding one long interior wire. When current runs through these wires, it creates a magnetic field that looks the same as if the long interior wire were actually outside the device. It's the electromagnetic equivalent of a ventriloquist throwing her voice; the source of the field is not actually outside the device, but the field itself is indistinguishable from the field that would have resulted if the source were outside the device. 

"We create the illusion of having this source at a distance," Mach-Batlle said. The researchers published their findings Oct. 23 in the journal Physical Review Letters

Biomedical applications

There are still questions about how well this method would work for real-world applications. One quirk of the system is that there is an area of very strong magnetic fields between the wire cylinder and the field-at-a-distance. This region could interfere with some applications of the research, Mach-Batlle said, though whether it would be problematic or not probably depends on what you're trying to do with the field. 

Possible applications beyond drug delivery include canceling out magnetic fields from afar, a technique that could be useful in quantum computing to reduce "noise" from external fields that can interfere with measurements. Another use might be improving transcranial magnetic stimulation, which uses magnets to stimulate neurons in the brain to treat depression. Being able to control magnetic fields at a distance could improve the targeting of transcranial magnetic stimulation, so that doctors could better focus on particular regions in the human brain. 

The researchers next hope to build a configuration of wires that allows for the creation of 3D magnetic fields from afar. 

Originally published on Live Science.

Graphene, one of the world's strongest materials, isn't normally magnetic. But when stacked and twisted, graphene develops a rare form of magnetism, new research finds. 

The magnetic field isn't created by the usual spin of electrons within the individual graphene layers, but instead arises from the collective swirling of electrons in all of the three-layers of the stacked graphene structure, researchers reported Oct. 12 in the journal Nature Physics.

Graphene is a material made of a single layer (or monolayer) of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb pattern. It's incredibly light and strong (though it is vulnerable to cracking). It also conducts electricity, making it exciting for use in electronics and sensors. 

Related: Elementary, my dear: 8 little-known elements

"We wondered what would happen if we combined graphene monolayers and bilayers into a twisted three-layer system," Cory Dean, a physicist at Columbia University in New York and one of the senior authors on the new paper, said in a statement. "We found that varying the number of graphene layers endows these composite materials with some exciting new properties that had not been seen before."

Dean and his colleagues stacked two layers of graphene and then added a single layer on top, rotating the stack by 1 degree. They then studied this graphene sandwich in a variety of circumstances, including temperatures just above absolute zero (the point at which all molecular motion stops). At these low temperatures, they found that the graphene stopped conducting electricity and became an insulator instead.

They also found that they could control the properties of the twisty stack of graphene by applying an electric field. When the electric field was oriented in one direction, the system acted like a twisted double layer of graphene. When they reversed the field, the stack took on the properties of a twisted four-layer graphene structure.

Perhaps strangest of all was the rare magnetism that appeared in the three-layer structure. A study published by another group in the journal Advanced Materials found that graphene bonded with boron nitride can give rise to a strange magnetic field; that field arose from the molecular bonds of the carbon in graphene and the boron in boron nitride. The new research reveals that this same type of magnetism can occur in pure graphene alone, simply because of interactions between carbon molecules. 

"Pure carbon is not magnetic," study co-author Matthew Yankowitz, a physicist at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in the statement. "Remarkably, we can engineer this property by arranging our three graphene sheets at just the right twist angles." 

The structure also contains regions where the properties are undisturbed by the twisting of the layer. These unique areas in the material could be exploited for data storage or quantum computing applications, study co-author Xiaodong Xu, also at the University of Washington, said in the statement. 

The researchers are now planning to delve deeper into the fundamental properties of the graphene structure. "This is really just the beginning," Yankowitz said.

Originally published on Live Science.

Telescopes all over the world watched a bright flash appear around a distant, supermassive black hole. And then, very quickly, it was gone.

The black hole — the heavy core of a galaxy named 1ES 1927+654 — was visible from Earth due to its corona, the ring of superheated particles whirling around its event horizon, or point of no return for infalling matter. There was nothing special about this state of affairs; all across space, astronomers can spot supermassive black holes thanks to their luminous coronas. And this corona was nestled inside a seemingly ordinary active galactic nucleus (AGN), or a larger region of dust, gas and star clusters.

But in March 2018, this black hole's corona briefly shined extra bright. The All-Sky Automated Survey for Super-Novae (ASSASN), a group of 24 Ohio State University telescopes around the world designed to hunt supernovas , picked up a 40-fold increase in brightness.

"This was an AGN that we sort of knew about, but it wasn't very special," Erin Kara, an MIT physicist and lead author of a paper on the event, said in a statement. "Then they noticed that this run-of-the-mill AGN became suddenly bright, which got our attention, and we started pointing lots of other telescopes in lots of other wavelengths to look at it."

After the AGN lit up, it dimmed suddenly. The black hole at its center — which can be seen best using X-ray telescopes — seemed to get 10,000 times less bright in less than a year.

"We expect that luminosity changes this big should vary on timescales of many thousands to millions of years," Kara said. This region, meanwhile, "But in this object, we saw it change by 10,000 over a year, and it even changed by a factor of 100 in eight hours, which is just totally unheard of and really mind-boggling."

Related: 9 facts about black holes that will blow your mind 

The dimming didn't last though. After the initial 8-hour dimming period, the corona continued to dim for much of the next year. Then, over a span of just a few months, the black hole lit up again. Now it looks almost exactly as it did before the corona flashed and disappeared.

So what happened?

Scientists aren't sure, but Kara and her colleagues have a theory.

We spot black holes mainly because of their accretion disks, the rings of matter swirling around them,  of which the corona is just the innermost, fastest moving part.

Black holes feed and grow by sipping from their accretion disks. It's difficult for anything to fall directly through the event horizon without first breaking up and spending time whirling circles around it. (This is true of any heavy object in space; It's much harder to fall into the sun, for example, than it is to orbit it.) A lot of the matter in an accretion disk does eventually fall into the black hole, but only after a long period of circling the drain. 

For something to drop out of an accretion disk and into a black hole, physicists think something has to jostle that object. Usually the culprit is turbulence. But if something heavy, probably a star, smacked into the corona of 1ES 1927+654, the star might have broken up and disturbed the accretion disk enough to knock the orbiting matter into the black whole all at once. Researchers call this sort of event a "tidal disruption."

In that case, the first bright flash would likely have been the star cracking open as it hit the corona. The massive gravity of the black hole would have overwhelmed the gravity holding the star together, ripping it apart.

The precipitous 8-hour drop in luminosity would have been the initial tidal disruption of the accretion disk. A whole bunch of gas, dust, and plasma that had been oribitng in neat circles before the star arrived would have fallen past the event horizon all at once -- smacked in by the collision with the star. And then the further dimming over a period of months would have been the remaining, jostled matter falling out of a now-unstable orbit.

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A rogue star could also have disrupted the magnetic field lines around the black hole. A black hole's magnetic field may help to maintain a high-energy corona -- the magnetic field lines holding the whirling, high-energy material in place.. A collision with a star could disrupt that field enough for the corona to fall apart.

If that's what happened here, it's a big deal.

There's a lot about black hole coronas that scientists don't understand, including the locations of the magnetic field lines that keep them intact. But they do know that a black hole the size of 1ES 1927+654's would have to get as close as about 45 million miles (75 million kilometers) from the singularity itself to be drawn in. That's not much further than the distance from Mercury to the sun.

If a star disrupted the magnetic fields of the black hole after falling apart at that distance, that suggests that corona and magnetic field lines are about that far from the black hole as well. From Earth, black hole coronas are too close to their central singularities to directly measure the distances involved. So that's a big deal.

"With the caveat that this event happened from a stellar tidal disruption, this would be some of the strictest constraints we have on where the corona must exist," Kara said. "We want to keep an eye on it. … It's still in this unusual high-flux state, and maybe it'll do something crazy again, so we don't want to miss that."

Originally published on Live Science.

A long-standing weak spot in Earth's magnetic field is getting weirder, and it may be splitting into two distinct zones of weakness. 

The South Atlantic Anomaly is a section of Earth's magnetic field between Africa and South America. For decades at least, this region of the magnetic field has gotten weaker and weaker, part of a global trend. According to the European Space Agency (ESA), the global magnetic field has lost 9% of its strength over the past 200 years. The South Atlantic Anomaly seems to be a particular point of change. Now, satellites investigating the anomaly have detected an intensified weakening southwest of Africa, suggesting that the anomaly could split into two separate low points. 

This change wouldn't signal any imminent danger, but it might help reveal what's going on in the Earth's core to drive the changes, according to the ESA. The agency's satellites are gathering data on the electromagnetic field to answer this question. 

Related: What if Earth's magnetic field disappeared?

Fluctuating field

The magnetic field is why compasses and GPS work, and it protects the planet from charged solar particles that can damage electrical equipment. For that reason, its fluctuations are important. But they are also poorly understood. The Earth's magnetic field arises from the churn of the planet's liquid iron core, which acts like an enormous magnet (thus, the North and South poles). But the magnetic field isn't as neat and tidy as the one created by a typical bar magnet. It has areas of strength and weakness, and sometimes the field even flip-flops, with north and south switching places. 

The current weakening of the Earth's magnetic field could portend another one of these flip-flops, or it could simply be a temporary fluctuation. If the field does reverse, the South Atlantic Anomaly is likely to be the origin of the change, research has found.

The ESA's Swarm constellation of satellites, launched in 2013, is probing the anomaly for small changes that could explain what's going on in the core. Since the group of satellites went into orbit, the South Atlantic Anomaly has developed a second center of minimum magnetic intensity, according to the ESA. This second weak spot indicates a complex process in the Earth's core; a simple dipolar, north-south magnetic field can't explain the pattern, the agency reported in a press release. 

Mystery below

"The new, eastern minimum of the South Atlantic Anomaly has appeared over the last decade and in recent years is developing vigorously," Jürgen Matzka, a geomagnetism researcher at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, said in a statement. "We are very lucky to have the Swarm satellites in orbit to investigate the development of the South Atlantic Anomaly. The challenge now is to understand the processes in Earth's core driving these changes."

The field is weak enough to sometimes affect satellites that pass over the region, according to the ESA. Unprotected from space radiation, the International Space Station and other satellites in low-Earth orbit sometimes experience "single event upsets" in which communications are disrupted or computers go on the fritz. Astronauts sometimes see sudden white flashes from a burst of radiation in front of their eyes. 

"This is a well-known area where all different types of satellites — not just a space station with people, but normal communication satellites and others — have problems," former astronaut Terry Virts told the BBC in 2018. "You want to kind of get through there as fast as you can on the way to the moon, or wherever you're going."

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Originally published on Live Science.  

The north magnetic pole is lurching away from its traditional home in the Canadian Arctic and toward Siberia because of a fierce tug-of-war battle being waged by two giant blobs hiding deep underground, at the core–mantle boundary, a new study finds.

These blobs, areas of negative magnetic flow under Canada and Siberia, are in a winners-take-all struggle. Already, as these blobs change shape and magnetic intensity, a victor has emerged; from 1999 to 2019, while the blob beneath Canada weakened, the blob under Siberia slightly intensified, the researchers found. "Together, these changes caused the north magnetic pole to travel towards Siberia," the researchers wrote in the study. 

"We've never seen anything like this before," study lead researcher Phil Livermore, an associate professor of geophysics at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, told Live Science in an email. 

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When scientists first located the north magnetic pole (the point where your compass needle points) in 1831, it sat in the northern Canadian territory of Nunavut. Soon, researchers realized that the north magnetic pole tended to wander, but it usually didn't stray far. Then, from 1990 to 2005, the magnetic pole's yearly jaunt jumped from a historic speed of no more than 9 miles (15 kilometers) a year to as much as 37 miles (60 km) a year, the researchers wrote in the study.

In October 2017, the north magnetic pole crossed the international date line and entered the Eastern Hemisphere, passing within 242 miles (390 km) of the geographic north pole. Then, the north magnetic pole began moving southward. The change was so rapid, that in 2019, geologists were forced to publish a new World Magnetic Model, a map that informs everything from airplane navigation to the GPS on smartphones, a year ahead of time. 

It was anyone's guess why the pole was leaving Canada for Siberia. That was until Livermore and his colleagues realized that the blobs were, in large part, responsible. 

Changing blobs

The magnetic field is generated by swirling liquid iron deep inside the Earth in the outer core. As such, changes in that sloshing iron can change the location of magnetic north.

The magnetic field isn't confined to the core, however; magnetic field lines "poke out" of Earth, Livermore said. As it turns out, these blobs are the spots where these lines pop out. "If you imagine the lines of [the] magnetic field like soft spaghetti, then these patches would be like a cluster of spaghetti sticking out of the Earth," he said.

The researchers discovered that from 1999 to 2019, the blob under Canada elongated east to west and divided into two smaller joined blobs, possibly because of a change in the pattern of core flow between 1970 and 1999. One of these blobs had a higher intensity than the other, but overall this elongation "caused the weakening of the Canadian patch at Earth’s surface," the researchers wrote in the study. 

Furthermore, because of the split, the Canadian blob with higher intensity became closer to the Siberian blob. This, in turn, enhanced the Siberian blob, the researchers wrote. 

However, these two blobs are in a delicate balance, so "it would take only a minor readjustment of the present configuration to reverse the current trend" of the north magnetic pole's current trek toward Siberia, the researchers wrote in the study. In other words, a tweak to one blob or the other could send the North Magnetic pole back toward Canada. 

Reconstructions of past north magnetic pole movements suggests that two blobs — and sometimes three — have influenced the pole's position over time. These blobs have prompted the pole to wander around northern Canada for the past 400 years, the researchers said. 

"But over the last 7,000 years, [the north magnetic pole] seems to have chaotically moved around the geographic pole, showing no preferred location," the researchers wrote in the study. The pole also moved toward Siberia in 1300 B.C., according to modeling. 

It's difficult to say what will happen next. "Our predictions are that the pole will continue to move towards Siberia, but forecasting the future is challenging and we cannot be sure," Livermore said. 

That forecasting will rely on "detailed monitoring of the geomagnetic field from Earth's surface and space in the coming years," the researchers wrote in the study, which was published online May 5 in the journal Nature Geoscience. 

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Originally published on Live Science.

Earth has a new age: the Chibanian geologic time interval, which took place from 770,000 to 126,000 years ago, thanks to a layer of sediment found on a riverside cliff in southern Japan.

The Chibanian age was named after Chiba, the Japanese prefecture where the sediment was found, and was recently ratified by the International Union of Geological Sciences. That period is important because it included the most recent reversal of Earth's magnetic field, an article in Eos said. At various points in our planet's history, Earth's magnetic north and south poles have swapped locations. When that flip happens, it leaves a mark in rocks around the planet. The cliffside sediment in Chiba, Japan, may offer a richer record of that reversal than any other site on Earth.

Related: 50 interesting facts about Earth

That polar flip, known as the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal, is still the subject of some debate. A 2014 paper published in the Geophysical Journal International used information from a layer of sediment found in Italy to argue that the flip took place in the span of a few decades. A 2019 paper published in the journal Science Advances argued, relying on information from ancient lava flows in Hawaii, that the reversal took closer to 22,000 years. As an excellent geologic record of this flip, the Chiba sediment could eventually help resolve the debate.

Studying how the polarity reversal happened might help us understand what's going on today. Our planet's magnetic poles have wandered in recent years, and scientists don't fully understand why.

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Originally published on Live Science.

Tiny crystals in Australia are helping scientists unlock the ancient history of our planet's first magnetic field, which disappeared hundreds of millions of years ago. And the crystals show that this field was a lot more powerful than anyone believed. That, in turn, could help answer a question about why life emerged on Earth.

Those tiny, old crystals are locked in rocks that date to well over half a billion years ago. At the time, tiny magnetic particles floated in the molten rock. But as that rock cooled, the particles, which aligned to the magnetic field orientation at the time, locked into place. And those particles still sit in a pose suggesting that they were influenced by a much more powerful magnetic field than scientists had assumed, a new study reveals. 

Earth's magnetic field is generated by the planet's solid iron inner core spinning in a liquid-iron outer core. Extending far beyond our atmosphere, this field protects the planet from dangerous particles blasting through space, such as solar wind and cosmic rays. But because its visible effects on the planet's surface are so minimal, studying the field's long history is difficult. However, this history is important for understanding the future of our own planet and other planets in the universe. We know our planet has had a strong magnetic shield for a long time, because it kept its surface water and sprouted life. Otherwise, cosmic radiation would have blasted both life and water off the surface long ago. In that scenario, Earth would look a lot like Mars, where the old magnetic field collapsed as the planet cooled and its core stopped spinning, according to a statement from the researchers.

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Earth has had a magnetic core for 4.2 billion years, according to the new study. But until 565 million years ago, long before the dinosaurs arrived and a bit before complex life emerged in the Cambrian explosion, that magnetic core worked completely differently. At that point, there was no inner core. But magnesium oxide, which had dissolved into the all-liquid core during the same giant impact that created Earth's moon, was slowly moving out of the core and into the mantle. That movement of magnesium generated movement in the liquid core that created Earth's early magnetic field.

When the magnesium oxide ran out, the field almost collapsed, researchers believe. But the solid inner core formed at around the same time and saved life on Earth.

Conventional wisdom held that the field produced by the old, magnesium-oxide magnet was a lot weaker than the one we have now. But studying those ancient ancient zircon crystals, which formed when the old magnetic field still suffused the planet, indicates that this was wrong.

"This research is telling us something about the formation of a habitable planet," John Tarduno, an Earth scientist at the University of Rochester and author of the new paper, said in the statement. "One of the questions we want to answer is why Earth evolved as it did, and this gives us even more evidence that the magnetic shielding was recorded very early on the planet."

The paper was published today (Jan. 20) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Originally published on Live Science.

A twisted little neutron star devoured chunks of its stellar twin, revealing a never-before-seen phenomenon to scientists watching on Earth.

Unlike most objects in space (including other neutron stars and planet Earth), neutron star GRO J2058+42 doesn't have two simple magnetic poles at its north and south ends. Instead, it has a distorted magnetic field, with warped regions of intense magnetism sprinkled across the object's surface. 

The celestial object was discovered in 1995, when it had a big outburst, but since then, it had been in a "quiet state," which concealed the star's twisted magnetic field. But in March, the object lit up again as it consumed a big chunk of matter from its twin, a regular star. That's according to a paper from an international team of scientists, published Sept. 18 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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After black holes, neutron stars are the densest known objects in the universe. Though the objects' internal physics are poorly understood, researchers know that neutron stars form from the dense cores of ancient stars that go supernova. Scientists also know that these objects are often as heavy and bright as normal stars but only about as wide as a small city. Often, as in the case of this neutron star, the ones we can see from Earth are paired up with normal stars and suck columns of matter off their companions' surfaces. Neutron stars often spin quite fast and regularly, and researchers study the objects by measuring their brightening and dimming and the particular frequencies of light they emit.

Sometimes, those frequencies include a "cyclotron line," a feature in the light coming from the star that suggests the presence of a powerful magnetic field, researchers in the new study wrote in a statement. Typically, the neutron stars fall into one of two categories: neutron stars with no cyclotron line and neutron stars with a steady, even cyclotron line caused by a magnetic field with two poles.

This star is different. When it lit up again in March, NASA quickly focused the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) on the light source, and this instrument discovered the cyclotron line, the authors wrote in the paper. But this line was present only 10% of the time. That suggests that something bizarre is going on with GRO J2058+42's magnetic fields. The star's field is pointing at Earth for only a tenth of its 3-minute, 16-second rotation period.

It's difficult to explain why this neutron star has this property, the authors wrote, in part because the data have a number of complicating factors. The gravitational fields around the neutron star are so intense, for example, that most of the X-rays we can see from Earth are actually coming from the far side of the star. As they leave the star's surface, the object's gravity bends their path through space until they're pointed at Earth. That and other issues make it especially difficult to disentangle the data here and figure out precisely what's going on, the authors wrote.

There are similar magnetic anomalies on our own star, the authors noted in the statement. Sunspots are, in fact, regions where magnetic fields have gotten tangled up in a way that's likely similar to what's happening here. But the effect of such spots is far less dramatic, and they have less of an impact on the whole star.

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Originally published on Live Science.

Imagine you're packing for the trip of a lifetime: Antarctica! You're going to see the South Pole and maybe hang out with some penguins. But how are you going to find the actual South Pole?

You might think that you would reach for a compass first. Compasses — navigation instruments that contain magnetized pointers — have helped people find their way around Earth for thousands of years. The planet's magnetic field attracts one end of the compass's magnetic pointer toward the North Pole, so compass users always know which way magnetic north lies. 

However, you may be surprised to learn that compasses behave strangely when they are close to the South Pole. Why is that?

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Earth has both geographic and magnetic poles. The geographic North and South Poles mark the opposite ends of a central axis that Earth spins on. However, the positions of the North and South magnetic poles aren't fixed points, and their distance from the corresponding geographic poles can vary by as much as several thousand kilometers. 

Earth's magnetic field is generated by the spin of the planet and the sloshing of iron-rich fluid in Earth's core, so the magnetic field — and the magnetic poles — shift in response to the speed and pattern of the fluid’s movement. 

Compass needles are designed to align with Earth's magnetic field, with the north end of the needle pointing to the magnetic North Pole and the opposite end of the needle pointing to the magnetic South Pole. When you take out your compass and let the needle settle, it will run parallel to the lines of Earth's magnetic field where you are standing.

But Earth's magnetic field is not arranged in straight lines all the way from the North Pole to the South Pole. As you get closer to the magnetic South Pole, the field lines will curve to dive straight into the magnetic South Pole, running perpendicular to Earth's surface. "So quite often, compasses actually won't work," said Tom Jordan, a geophysicist with the British Antarctic Survey. "Instead of trying to point horizontally, what your compass needle's actually trying to do is point straight down into the Earth."

What that means is, if you were to visit the South Pole bearing a compass with a free-floating needle that could move in three dimensions, the "south" end of that compass needle would point straight down once you reach the magnetic South Pole, Jordan told Live Science.

That compass would behave similarly at the magnetic North Pole; the north end of the needle would be trying to point straight down into the ground, according to Jordan. 

Because compasses behave oddly near the magnetic North and South Poles, polar explorers used to calculate the location of due north by mapping the angle of the sun or the positions of stars, Jordan explained. Today, people trekking around Antarctica use GPS to figure out which way is north. What they do is move around a bit to figure out which way is north, kind of like when you don't trust that your phone's maps app knows where you actually are and which way you are actually facing.

It's only on the equator that a typical compass will provide the most accurate reading about which direction is north and which direction is south, Jordan said. That's because at the equator, all of the planet's magnetic field lines are horizontal and parallel to Earth's surface, he explained.

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Originally published on Live Science.

Hot liquid that churns around Earth's outer core powers a gigantic magnetic field that's been hugging our planet since its infancy, protecting it from harmful solar radiation. But this magnetic field is known to get restless — and a couple of times every million years or so, the poles flip, and magnetic south becomes magnetic north and vice versa.

Now, a new study suggests that the magnetic poles can flip much more frequently than scientists thought. That's what seems to have happened around 500 million years ago during the Cambrian period, when Earth's creatures were undergoing evolutionary growth spurts, transforming into more complex life-forms. 

To understand the workings of the magnetic field during this time, a group of researchers from the Institute of Physics of the Globe of Paris and the Russian Academy of Sciences collected sediment samples from an outcrop in northeastern Siberia.

Related: 9 Cool Facts About Magnets

In the lab, they determined the orientation of magnetic particles trapped in the sediments by slowly heating them to extreme temperatures to demagnetize them. The orientation of the particles corresponded to the magnetic field direction (which way magnetic north pointed, for instance) at the time and place the sediment was deposited. The researchers fine-tuned the age of the sediments by dating trilobite fossils found in the same layers, and were thus able to approximate when the magnetic fields flipped. 

The team found that around 500 million years ago, the planet's magnetic field flipped about 26 times every million years or so — the highest frequency ever suggested. That's "extreme," considering that until recently, five flips per million years was considered very high, said lead author Yves Gallet, research director of the French National Center for Scientific Research at the Institute of Physics of the Globe of Paris.

But perhaps "just as interesting" is that shortly after this time, within a few million years, the frequency of flipping dropped off extremely quickly, Gallet said. Between 495 million and 500 million years ago, the magnetic field started flipping at a rate of about one to two times every million years. 

The "dominant idea for many years" was that the frequency of magnetic field reversals would only evolve gradually across tens of millions of years, he said. But "here we show a sudden change in reversal frequency occurring on a million-year timescale."

It's clear that the process that generated the magnetic field in the outer core 500 million years ago was very different from that observed today, he added. But what, exactly pushed Earth's magnetic field to flip so frequently, is unclear, he said. One possibility is that the frequent reversals could have been caused by changes in thermal conditions at the boundary between the liquid-iron outer core and the mantle driven by mantle dynamics, he said. Recent studies have also suggested that the inner core may have begun to cool and solidify around 600 or 700 million years ago. This process could have also played a role in the functioning of the magnetic field, he said. 

The last magnetic field reversal happened around 780,000 years ago, but although there are concerns that it might happen again soon — which might temporarily weaken the field, causing harmful solar radiation to reach us — it's likely not "soon" in terms of human years. 

"It is important to remember that the timescale we are considering for the evolution in magnetic reversal frequency is at least a few millions of years," Gallet said. At this scale, the magnetic field reversals could evolve to be more or less rapid. But "a magnetic polarity reversal is not for tomorrow," he added.

The findings were published online Sept. 20 in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. 

Editor's Note: This article was updated on Oct. 11 at 9:50 a.m. to clarify that the frequent reversals could have been caused by changes in the thermal conditions at the boundary between the liquid-iron core and the mantle, rather than in the liquid-iron core.

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Originally published on Live Science.

Extending from Earth like invisible spaghetti is the planet's magnetic field. Created by the churn of Earth's core, this field is important for everyday life: It shields the planet from solar particles, it provides a basis for navigation and it might have played an important role in the evolution of life on Earth. 

But what would happen if Earth's magnetic field disappeared tomorrow? A larger number of charged solar particles would bombard the planet, putting power grids and satellites on the fritz and increasing human exposure to higher levels of cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation. In other words, a missing magnetic field would have consequences that would be problematic but not necessarily apocalyptic, at least in the short term.

And that's good news, because for more than a century, it's been weakening. Even now, there are especially flimsy spots, like the South Atlantic Anomaly in the Southern Hemisphere, which create technical problems for low-orbiting satellites. 

Related: What Will Happen to Earth When the Sun Dies?

The first thing to understand about the magnetic field is that, even if it weakens, it's not going to disappear — at least, not for billions of years. Earth owes its magnetic field to its molten outer core, which is made mostly of iron and nickel. The churning outer core is powered by the convection of heat released as the inner core grows and solidifies, said John Tarduno, a geophysicist at the University of Rochester. (The inner core grows by about a millimeter per year.) 

This magnetic-field engine, known as a dynamo, has been chugging along for billions of years. Scientists think that the current core arrangement may have settled into place about 1.5 billion years ago, according to 2015 research that found a leap in the magnetic field's strength around then. But Tarduno and his team have found evidence for a magnetic field on Earth in the planet's oldest minerals, zircons, dating back 4.2 billion years, suggesting that activity in the core has been creating magnetism for a very long time. 

It isn't clear why the dynamo got started, Tarduno told Live Science, though it's possible that the enormous planetary impact that created the moon might have been the key driver. This impact, which occurred perhaps 100 million years after Earth came together, could have shaken up any stratification, or layering, of materials in Earth's core: Imagine shaking up a bottle of oil and water on a planetary scale. This disruption could have promoted the convection that still drives Earth's dynamo today. 

Eventually, the inner core will probably grow large enough that convection in the outer core is no longer efficient, and the magnetic field will fail. But that scenario is so far off that it's not worth losing much sleep over. 

"We're talking billions of years," Tarduno said.

Weakening magnetic field

Far more relevant to the lives of humans is that the magnetic field is weakening. Scientists have been measuring this weakening directly with magnetic observatories and satellites for the past 160 years. Whether the field was faltering before that is a bit murkier, as is what it will do next. The magnetic field is currently about 80% dipolar, Tarduno said. That means it acts mostly like a bar magnet. If you could put iron filings around the planet (and remove the influence of the sun, which spews a constant stream of charged particles called the solar wind toward Earth, blowing the magnetic field around like long hair in a breeze), the resulting magnetic field lines would show a clear North and South. But 20% of the field is non-dipolar, meaning it's more complicated; there are local variations. 

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In the past, the magnetic field has flipped, swapping North and South. The last of these reversals happened 780,000 years ago, around the era of Homo erectus. Weakening of the field has typically preceded these flips, raising questions about whether another flip-flop is imminent. But the field also weakens at times and then strengthens again without flipping, a phenomenon called an excursion. 

Tarduno and his team have found that a weird eddy in the core under South Africa might be contributing to some of this weakness. This eddy appears to cause the South Atlantic Anomaly, a known weak spot in the field that stretches from about 190 miles (300 kilometers) east of Brazil across much of South America. In this area, charged particles from the solar wind dip down closer than usual to Earth. The South Atlantic Anomaly isn't particularly noticeable on the ground. But Earth-orbiting satellites encounter more damaging solar particles there, and astronauts who have traveled through the region on the International Space Station have reported shooting-star visual phenomena thought to be caused by relatively high levels of radiation at the level of low Earth orbit there. 

A field-free Earth

Tarduno and his team suspect that the variation in the mantle under South Africa might have been the trigger point for magnetic field reversals in the past. The good news is that, even if the field is weakening, or preparing to flip, it's not going to disappear; there's no evidence that the magnetic field has ever gone away completely during a reversal. 

Even if the field reverses, "we'll still have some magnetic field present; it just is going to be a very weak magnetic field," Tarduno said. 

What would this world with a minimal magnetic field look like? Well, your compass wouldn't work, for one thing. "It's just going to be pointing toward the [region of] the highest magnetic field," Tarduno said. "It could be very close to you; it could be very far away." 

The northern and southern lights would be visible from lower latitudes, because these colorful shows are the result of the interaction between charged particles hurled from the sun in the solar wind and Earth's magnetosphere. Currently, these auroras appear near the poles, following Earth's largely North-South magnetic field lines, but a weaker field would allow the particles to penetrate Earth's atmosphere, lighting up the sky closer to the equator. 

The conditions in the South Atlantic Anomaly for satellites might become common across the globe, which would cause technical glitches. Solar particles can ping electronics, disrupting bits of memory in what are called single-event upsets, or SEUs. When solar particles interact with the charged layer of Earth's atmosphere called the ionosphere, they also knock electrons free from their molecular orbits. These free electrons then interfere with the transmission of the high-frequency radio waves used for communication. 

Interactions between the solar wind and Earth's atmosphere can also break down the ozone layer over time, Tarduno said, which would raise humanity's collective ultraviolet radiation exposure and increase skin cancer risks. 

"Whilst it probably wouldn't be utterly catastrophic for life, there would be a much higher radiation dosage on the ground without a magnetic field," said Martin Archer, a space plasma physicist at Queen Mary University of London.

There is little evidence that past magnetic field variations have impacted life on Earth. Still, the magnetic field has undoubtedly shaped Earth's surface, helping to keep the planet's fragile atmosphere from being blown into space by the relentless force of the solar wind, Archer told Live Science. 

A magnetic field is not crucial for having an atmosphere — Venus has no magnetic field and has a massive, if unwelcoming, atmosphere — but it certainly acts as an additional protective layer. Mars, which used to have a magnetic field but lost it some 4 billion years ago, has had its atmosphere almost entirely stripped away. And if there were a way to give the moon an Earth-like atmosphere, the solar wind would whittle it to nothing in a mere century, Archer said.

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Originally published on Live Science.

Three times in the last 40 years, giant gamma-ray flares have bombarded our corner of space. These giant flares aren't dangerous, and last just about one-tenth of a second. But they're wildly out of proportion to the usual gamma-ray beams bouncing around the universe. Since the first of the three flares was detected on March 5, 1979, astronomers have narrowed down the source of these unusual events: tiny magnetars, lashing out with enormous energy after some unknown cataclysmic event. And now astrophysicists have a new theory as to what those cataclysmic events are.

Magnetars are a type of neutron star — superdense objects that can outweigh our sun, but are roughly the size of Staten Island. All neutron stars have intense magnetic fields, but, as Live Science has previously reported, some are magnetic outliers — wrapped in magnetic field lines powerful enough to distort their behavior. In a new paper, released as a draft online Aug. 2 in the preprint journal arXiv, a team of Spanish astronomers argue that instabilities in magnetic fields could briefly crack a magnetar open — causing it to bare the intense energies in its guts. (The study has not yet been peer-reviewed.)

To reach that conclusion, the physicists studied the equations governing the twisted magnetic fields around magnetars. Most of the time, those fields are fairly stable. But there's a "branch" of solutions to the equations governing the magnetic fields in which the solutions are unstable. And those instabilities are catastrophic. 

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Unstable fields quickly right themselves, the researchers wrote, slamming around until they find a new, stable configuration. That process, they found, releases 30% of the total magnetic field energy across the powerful little star's rigid crust — in the form of waves of magnetic energy tall enough to span from the south shore of Long Island to Connecticut. That energy induces powerful mechanical stress on a magnetar's hard, half-mile-thick (1 kilometer) crust.

"Our results show that for typical magnetar field strengths...the instability is likely to break a large fraction of the crust down to the inner crust," the researchers wrote. "For the largest magnetic fields the stresses induced in the crust are sufficient to shatter the entire crust."

And all three magnetars that have generated giant flares, they pointed out, have unusually large magnetic fields.

Once a magnetar crust cracks open, they wrote, a giant fireball would blast out at "ultrarelatavistic" speed, or a significant fraction of the speed of light. The whole process would take less than a second and from Earth, what we’d see is one of those giant gamma-ray flares astronomers have been detecting since 1979.

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Originally published on Live Science.

In case you've forgotten, Earth's sun is totally epic: It's home to towering fountains of plasma, "lava lamp blobs" of mystery matter 500 times larger than Earth, and a writhing magnetic field that twists, turns, snaps and lashes out into space every 11 years or so, seriously screwing with Earth's power grid.

While trying to better understand that 11-year stellar-tantrum cycle, characterized by a sudden increase in sunspot activity near the sun's equator, scientists discovered a new form of solar epicness you should probably be aware of. When one solar cycle ends and the next begins, the researchers wrote, the sun may experience cataclysmic magnetic field collisions — known as "terminator events" — resulting in gargantuan tsunamis of plasma that can charge across the sun's surface for weeks at a time.

According to the authors of two new studies (published February 4 in the journal Scientific Reports and July 9 in the journal Solar Physics), these solar tsunamis could be a missing link in the solar cycle, kick-starting the production of sunspots — gigantic spots on the sun that tend to form near strong magnetic field lines and are cooler than other parts of the sun’s surface — near the sun's middle latitudes — just a few weeks after they start to disappear near its equator.

"We have observed the sunspot cycle for hundreds of years, but it's been a mystery what mechanism could transport a signal from the equator, where the cycle ends, to the sun's mid-latitudes, where the next cycle begins, in such a relatively short amount of time," Mausumi Dikpati, a senior scientist at the High Altitude Observatory in Boulder, Colorado, and a co-author of both new studies, said in a statement.

Solar tsunamis, Dikpati and colleagues argue, may be the answer.

For the first study, researchers looked at 140 years' worth of solar observations taken from Earth and satellites. The scientists focused on the movement of coronal bright points — small loops of plasma that form over magnetic hotspots in the sun's atmosphere; these points shine with extreme ultraviolet light before disappearing, usually within a single day. Unlike sunspots, which appear only during periods of high solar activity (known as solar maximums), bright points can occur during less-active periods (called solar minimums), providing a more comprehensive view of solar activity across cycles, the researchers wrote.

Tracking these bright points revealed an interesting pattern: They first appeared around 55 degrees latitude (about 20 degrees higher than sunspots tend to appear), then migrated toward the equator by a few degrees latitude every year. Once the points reached about 35 degrees latitude, they began overlapping with sunspots. The points and spots continued moving toward the equator in tandem for several years; when they got there, they all vanished in a "terminator" event. A few weeks after a termination, bright points always started popping up like clockwork in the sun's mid-latitudes again.

Some physical feature of these terminator events seemed to be triggering the start of the next cycle in higher latitudes — but, what? Here's where the tsunamis come in.

In the second paper (co-authored by two of the researchers who worked on the first), researchers explained how terminator events could end in the collision of two huge magnetic field lines near the sun's equator, resulting in dual tsunamis of plasma.

According to the study, magnetic field lines like these — called "toroidal magnetic field lines," because they stretch around the diameter of the sun in a donut (or toroid) shape — may be responsible for the emergence of bright points and sunspots as they move across the sun's surface. It's possible the field lines also serve as magnetic "dams," the researchers wrote, trapping plasma behind them as they advance toward the sun's equator.

When two opposing field lines (one generated by the sun's north pole and the other by the south pole) meet at the equator, their opposing charges cancel each other out, resulting in what the researchers call "mutual annihilation." The field lines snap, releasing the plasma trapped behind them in two massive tidal waves that rush forward, bounce off each other, and surge backward toward the poles in twin tsunamis, traveling 1,000 feet (300 meters) per second.

Within a week or two, these waves reach the mid-latitudes of either hemisphere, where they reach another set of magnetic field lines that are already drumming up bright points for the next solar cycle. When the tidal wave hits this new set of lines, it buoys those magnetic field lines up toward the surface, causing a surge in sunspot creation to accompany the bright points.

This, the researchers wrote, could explain the strangely consistent gap between the termination of one cycle and the start of the next. Computer simulations showed that solar tsunamis like this are theoretically possible — however, for now, they remain just a really cool idea. Luckily, astronomers may soon have a chance to find real evidence of these solar tsunamis; judging from current bright point activity near the equator, the researchers wrote, the sun is due for its next tsunami by 2020.

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Originally published on Live Science.

For the first time, scientists have created a permanently magnetic liquid. These liquid droplets can morph into various shapes and be externally manipulated to move around, according to a new study.

We typically imagine magnets as being solid, said senior author Thomas Russell, a distinguished professor of polymer science and engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. But now we know that "we can make magnets that are liquid and they could conform to different shapes — and the shapes are really up to you."

The liquid droplets can change shape from a sphere to a cylinder to a pancake, he told Live Science. "We can [even] make it look like a sea urchin if we wanted." [9 Cool Facts About Magnets]

Russell and his team created these liquid magnets by accident while experimenting with 3D printing liquids at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (where Russell is also a visiting faculty scientist). The goal was to create materials that are solid but have characteristics of liquids for various energy applications.

One day, postdoctoral student and lead author Xubo Liu noticed 3D-printed material, made from magnetized particles called iron-oxides, spinning around in unison on a magnetic stir plate. So when the team realized the entire construct, not just the particles, had become magnetic, they decided to investigate further.

Using a technique to 3D-print liquids, the scientists created millimeter-size droplets from water, oil and iron-oxides. The liquid droplets keep their shape because some of the iron-oxide particles bind with surfactants — substances that reduce the surface tension of a liquid. The surfactants create a film around the liquid water, with some iron-oxide particles creating part of the filmy barrier, and the rest of the particles enclosed inside, Russell said.

The team then placed the millimeter-size droplets near a magnetic coil to magnetize them. But when they took the magnetic coil away, the droplets demonstrated an unseen behavior in liquids — they remained magnetized. (Magnetic liquids called ferrofluids do exist, but these liquids are only magnetized when in the presence of a magnetic field.)

When those droplets approached a magnetic field, the tiny iron-oxide particles all aligned in the same direction. And once they removed the magnetic field, the iron-oxide particles bound to the surfactant in the film were so jam-packed that they couldn't move and so remained aligned. But those free-floating inside the droplet also remained aligned.

The scientists don't fully understand how these particles hold onto the field, Russell said. Once they figure that out, there are many potential applications. For example, Russell imagines printing a cylinder with a non-magnetic middle and two magnetic caps. "The two ends would come together like a horseshoe magnet," and be used as a mini "grabber," he said.

In an even more bizarre application, imagine a mini liquid person — a smaller-scale version of the liquid T-1000 from the second "Terminator" movie — Russell said. Now imagine that parts of this mini liquid man are magnetized and parts aren't. An external magnetic field could then force the little person to move its limbs like a marionette.

"For me, it sort of represents a sort of new state of magnetic materials," Russell said. The findings were published on July 19 in the journal Science.

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Originally published on Live Science.

The monster black hole at the center of the Milky Way is eerily quiet, and now astronomers think they know why.

There are invisible magnetic field lines wrapped around it — researchers already suspected this. But new images show that those unseen lines form a structure that extends light-years across space and might be powerful enough to stop material from falling into the black hole. And if giant magnetic fields are knocking material into an orbit that's out of the black hole's grasp, that could explain why it mostly slumbers. In fact, it's so dim that a magnetar can outshine it in the sky.

"The spiral shape of the magnetic field channels the gas into an orbit around the black hole," C. Darren Dowell, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and lead author of the study, said in a NASA statement. "This could explain why our black hole is quiet while others are active." [9 Weird Facts About Black Holes]

Once stuff falls beyond the event horizon of a black hole, it's functionally gone forever. The space beyond the event horizon is, from our perspective, truly black. There's nothing to see there. But as the Event Horizon Telescope's image of the supermassive black hole in the Virgo A galaxy showed this spring, the event horizon around a black hole is often wrapped in clouds of in-falling material. And that material moves so fast and creates so much friction that it shines, creating light shows that astronomers can see from Earth.

Some supermassive black holes put on those sorts of light shows all the time. But Sagittarius A* is one of the more common, "quiescent" type of supermassive black hole. The structure doesn't seem to be gobbling up much material. And Dowell's team suspects these intense magnetic fields might be why.

To map the magnetic field lines, a team of researchers pointed a NASA infrared telescope called SOFIA — mounted on the back of a Boeing 747 aircraft — at Sagittarius A*. They haven't formally published their results yet, but the researchers presented their findings at the June meeting of the American Astronomical Society and described them in the NASA statement. SOFIA couldn't see the invisible lines, of course, but it could see the dust particles floating through those lines. And the magnetic field structure caused all the particles to point in one direction. Those aligned particles, in turn, polarized the infrared light passing through the dust — in much the same way sunglasses can polarize light passing through them — allowing researchers to figure out where the lines were and in what direction they were pointing.

Astronomers not involved in the research said the measurement of the magnetic field lines was exciting, but were skeptical that those lines fully accounted for the black hole's quiet state. (Each one also each noted that it's difficult to fully evaluate the work before the paper is published.)

Erin Bonning, an astrophysicist and black hole researcher at Emory University who was not involved in the SOFIA work, pointed out that the image of the magnetic field lines is about 10 light-years across, where 1 light-year is equal to about 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion kilometers). That's much wider than Sagittarius A* — an object that would fit within our solar system — and so is too large to capture details in the immediate vicinity of the black hole. That smaller, closer region, she said, is where you'd expect the most important events knocking material into a black hole — or keeping the material at bay — to take place.

"The press release seems to suggest that the magnetic field is channeling the material into an orbit that 'misses' the black hole. This would be a plausible explanation for the lack of strong accretion onto Sgr A*," Bonning wrote in an email to Live Science.

However, she pointed out, you wouldn't necessarily expect material to fall into a black hole even without the magnetic field. Most supermassive black holes don't manage to absorb that much material — perhaps because much of it piles up in the accretion disk orbiting the dark cosmic beast — and stay pretty quiet.

"You can think of it this way: As massive as Sgr A* is, it is a physically *tiny* target on astronomical scales. To get matter to fall into the vicinity of the event horizon, it has to be moving more or less directly toward it," Bonning said.

That happens most often in galaxies that have recently undergone violent mergers, she said. But the Milky Way hasn't undergone such a recent merger.

"If you have structured magnetic fields light-years away from the black hole strong enough to direct the motion of the gas, it may be that this is an additional mechanism preventing matter infall into galactic centers," Bonning said.

But that doesn't mean the magnetic field is the main mechanism keeping the black hole quiet.

Misty Bentz, an astrophysicist at Georgia State University who also was not involved in the research, pointed out that even if magnetic fields are playing an important role in keeping Sagittarius A* quiet, that doesn't mean similar forces are at work around quiet supermassive black holes in other galaxies.

"Our galaxy is a bit special because our location inside of it means that we can study many properties and regions in great detail," she said. "Other galaxies, however, are generally too distant to achieve the same level of resolution and detail, especially when we are talking about the crowded environments in their galactic centers."

And what's true in the Milky Way might not be true elsewhere.

"There could be a variety of different reasons why other black holes are not feeding, including shock waves and winds from supernova explosions that expel the gas from the galaxy center, or there could just be an overall absence of gas in the galaxy center," Bentz said.

Simeon Bird, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Riverside, who also was not involved in the research, told Live Science that "Magnetic fields can certainly help explain why some black holes are quiescent while others are active," but like Bentz pointed out, "all other supermassive black holes are much farther away, so it's not easy to measure magnetic fields around them."

Like Bentz, Bird is interested in other explanations for why black holes go quiet. [5 Reasons We May Live in a Multiverse]

"Another possibility that might help keep black holes quiescent is that during an active phase, the black hole heats the gas around it to the point where it is completely disrupted," he said. "If the black hole is very active, the energy from the black hole might be able to just remove the gas completely, knock it clean out of the galaxy."

And once that happens, that black hole would likely go quiet.

Still, despite some skepticism that the magnetic field lines could fully explain why Sagittarius A* is so quiet — or that other supermassive black holes are quiet for the same reason — Bonning, Bentz and Bird called the study important, saying that it offers astronomers new keys to unlocking the mysteries of supermassive black hole behaviors.

"Every discovery, like the role of magnetic fields around Sagittarius A*, helps to provide one piece of the puzzle, and with enough puzzle pieces, we can hope to understand the life cycles of galaxies and the black holes that they host," Bentz said.

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Editor's note: Due to an error in the editing process, this article originally misstated the length of a light-year. It in fact takes light 1 year to travel 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion kilometers) in a vacuum.

Originally published on Live Science.

Tragedy struck when a motorcyclist driving in Florida during a thunderstorm was struck by lightning, causing him to crash and die on Sunday (June 9), according to news sources.

The man's death, the second U.S. fatality from lightning this year, may make some people wonder why the motorcycle's rubber tires didn't protect the 45-year-old from the lightning bolt. But this belief is an urban legend, said John Jensenius, a lightning safety specialist with the National Lightning Safety Council.

"It's a myth that rubber tires protect a vehicle from being struck by lightning," Jensenius told Live Science in an email. [Elves, Sprites & Blue Jets: Earth's Weirdest Lightning] 

Vehicles are struck by lightning fairly regularly. But if you find yourself stuck on the road during a lightning storm, it's best to be in a hard-topped metal vehicle, Jensenius said. That's because the metal exterior acts like a Faraday cage. The cage — named for the 19th-century scientist British Michael Faraday, who studied electromagnetism and electrochemistry — keeps any electrical charge that hits it in its outer metal shell, away from the interior (in this case, any passengers within a vehicle).

"If struck, the electrical charge will pass around the metal shell of a hard-topped vehicle and into the ground, often passing through or over the tires," Jensenius said. "If people can't get inside a substantial building, we recommend that they get inside a hard-topped metal vehicle with the windows rolled up."

In the man's case, he was driving southbound on Interstate 95 in Volusia County, Florida, according to Click Orlando. Lightning struck the man's helmet, officials said, based on a blast mark on the helmet's plastic shell.

Jensenius was quick to debunk another myth about lightning — the idea that it can't strike you if you're traveling fast enough. But lightning travels far too quickly to be outrun by humans, he said.

"The time it takes to go from the cloud base to the ground is only a small fraction of a second," Jensenius said. "During this time, anything traveling at highway speeds is virtually standing still with respect to the lightning."

Since 2006, there have been 10 lightning fatalities related to motorcycles in the United States, "although, in several cases, the rider was not on the bike when struck," Jensenius said.

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Originally published on Live Science.

Jupiter's magnetic field has changed since the 1970s, and physicists have proved it.

That's not exactly a surprise. Earth's magnetic field, the only planetary field for which we have good ongoing measurements, changes all the time. But the new information is important, because these small changes reveal hidden details of a planet's internal "dynamo," the system that produces its magnetic field.

In a paper published May 20 in the journal Nature Astronomy, a team of researchers looked at magnetic field data from four past missions to Jupiter (Pioneer 10, which reached Jupiter in 1973; Pioneer 11, which reached Jupiter in 1974; Voyager 1, which reached Jupiter in 1979; and Ulysses, which reached Jupiter in 1992). [10 Places in the Solar System We'd Most Like to Visit]

They compared that data to a map of the planet's magnetic field produced by the spacecraft Juno, which conducted the most recent and most thorough probe of the giant planet. In 2016, Juno orbited very close to Jupiter, passing from pole to pole, gathering detailed gravitational and magnetic field data. That allowed researchers to develop a thorough model of the planet's magnetic field and some detailed theories as to how it's produced.

The researchers behind this paper showed that data from those four older probes, though more limited (each of them just swung by the planet once), didn't quite fit with the 2016 model of Jupiter's magnetic field.

"Finding something as minute as these changes in something so immense as Jupiter's magnetic field was a challenge," Kimee Moore, a Juno scientist at Harvard and lead author on the paper, said in a statement. "Having a baseline of close-up observations over four decades long provided us with just enough data to confirm that Jupiter's magnetic field does indeed change over time."

One challenge: The researchers were only interested in changes to Jupiter's internal magnetic field, but the planet also has magnetism coming from its upper atmosphere. Charged particles from volcanic eruptions on Io, Jupiter's most volatile moon, end up in the Jovian magnetosphere and ionosphere (a region of charged particles in the outer reaches of Jupiter's atmosphere) and can also change the magnetic field. But the researchers developed methods to subtract those effects from their data set, leaving them with data based almost entirely on the internal dynamo of the planet.

So the question was, what caused the changes to happen? What's going on in Jupiter's dynamo?

The researchers looked at several different causes of magnetic field changes. Their data most closely matched the predictions of a model in which winds in the planet’s interior change the magnetic field.

"These winds extend from the planet's surface to over 1,860 miles (3,000 kilometers) deep, where the planet's interior begins changing from gas to highly conductive liquid metal," the statement said.

In truth, researchers can't see that deep into Jupiter, so the depth measurements are really best estimates, with several uncertainties, the researchers wrote in the paper. Still, scientists have robust theories to explain how the winds behave.

"They are believed to shear the magnetic fields, stretching them and carrying them around the planet," the statement said.

Most of those wind-driven changes seem to be concentrated in Jupiter's Great Blue Spot, a region of intense magnetic energy near Jupiter’s equator. (This is not the same thing as the Great Red Spot.) The northern and southern parts of the blue spot are shifting east on Jupiter, and the central third is shifting west, causing changes to the planet's magnetic field.

"It is incredible that one narrow magnetic hot spot, the Great Blue Spot, could be responsible for almost all of Jupiter's secular variation, but the numbers bear it out," Moore said in the statement. "With this new understanding of magnetic fields, during future science passes we will begin to create a planetwide map of Jupiter's [magnetic] variation. It may also have applications for scientists studying Earth's magnetic field, which still contains many mysteries to be solved."

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Originally published on Live Science.

Ancient stone "potbelly" sculptures on display in a park in Guatemala are magnetized on certain spots, suggesting the pre-Columbian civilization that made them had a practical knowledge of magnetism.

Eleven of these sculptures of giant heads and distorted bodies, known as "potbellies" because of their distinctive rotund shapes, are on display in a plaza in the small town of La Democracia, near Guatemala's Pacific coast. They were installed there in the 1970s after being brought from ancient sites in the nearby Monte Alto region.

Guatemalans are thought to have created these potbelly sculptures more than 2,000 years ago, which would date them to the Late Preclassic period of Mesoamerican civilizations. Previous studies of the sculptures had suggested several had magnetic anomalies on their surfaces. [The 25 Most Mysterious Archaeological Finds on Earth]

In the new research, a team led by scientists at Harvard University studied the potbellies with both a handheld magnetometer and a portable scanning magnetometer that could be fixed to the sculptures to provide detailed magnetic mapping of their surfaces.

They found that 10 of the 11 sculptures had significant magnetic anomalies and six of them showed strong magnetic anomalies that were probably created by lightning strikes while the rocks were still in the ground.

What's more, many of the giant heads and bodies of the ancient sculptures were carved to make the magnetic anomalies align with either the sculptures' right cheeks or their belly buttons — suggesting that ancient sculptors knew how to detect magnetism, and that they had selected magnetic boulders to highlight these parts of the body.

The finding gives strength to a theory that early Mesoamerican civilizations knew about the attractive properties of magnetism, and how to detect it with magnetic objects like lodestones suspended on a string — possibly even before magnetism is first known to have been described in China about 2,700 years ago.

It is not known for certain why those body parts were chosen, but it's likely that the magnetism of the sculptures contributed to their cultural influence.

"Potbellies may have represented the ancestors of the ruling class and given physical form to their heredity-based claim on power," the researchers wrote in their study. "If this interpretation is correct, the ability of potbellies to deflect, dramatically in most cases, a suspended lodestone would have served to reinforce their message of living ancestral continuity."

Art historian Julia Guernsey, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who has written a book about Guatemalan potbelly sculptures, is enthusiastic about the new research.

"Their results speak to the significance of stone in ancient Mesoamerica and its symbolic properties, but also to ancient understandings of human bodies and beliefs that certain key features — like faces or stomachs and navels — were particularly potent or powerful," she said.

The research will be published in the June issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.

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Original article on Live Science.

All four known forces of nature have their own unique place. Gravity, electromagnetism, weak nuclear, strong nuclear: Each one governing some little domain of our lives. While our everyday experiences are dominated by the gravity of the Earth and the electromagnetism of light and fridge magnets, the twin nuclear forces play key roles, too — just at very, very tiny scales.

How tiny? Imagine yourself ballooning up to become the size of the solar system. Your hands swim through the Oort Cloud itself, the planets nestle above your belly button. You are so large that electrical signals take weeks or even months to make their journey through your nervous system, making even the simplest gestures achingly slow.

That's the difference between your current size (roughly a couple meters) and 10^15 meters.

Related: What Is the Strong Force?

Now, run it in reverse. Imagine a scale so small that your current body feels as vast as the solar system. A scale where your movements eke along at the slowest of paces. This incredibly tiny scale is the femtometer: 10^-15 meters. It's the scale of the atomic nucleus.

Into the proton

From way up here, it's tempting to think of the proton as a single particle. A hard shell of positive charge and mass, able to bounce and knock around as easily as a billiard ball. But in reality, a proton is made of three smaller particles. These particles have the delightfully quirky name of quarks. There are a total of six kinds of quarks in nature, but for our close examination of the proton we only need to care about two of them, named the up and down quarks.

Like I said, a proton is a triplet of quarks: two up quarks and one down quark. These quarks bind together as a team, and that bound team is what we call a proton.

Except, that shouldn't make any sense.

The two up quarks have the exact same electric charge (because they're the exact same kind of particle), so they should absolutely hate each other. How do they stay so tightly glued?

And what's more, we know from quantum mechanics that two quarks can't share the exact same state — you can't have two of the same kind bound together like that. Those two up quarks shouldn't be allowed to coexist together like that. And yet they not only tolerate each other, but seem to really enjoy the company!

What's going on?

A different color

In the 1950s and '60s, physicists began to realize that the proton is not fundamental — it can be broken down into smaller parts. So they did a bunch of experiments and developed a bunch of theories to crack that particular nut. And they immediately ran into a) the existence of quarks and b) the puzzling conundrums above.

Something was holding those three quarks together. Something really, really strong. A new force of nature.

The strong force.

The then-hypothesized strong force solved the problems of coexisting quarks by simple brute force. Oh, you don't like to be together because you can't share the same state? Well, too bad, the strong force is going to make you do it anyway, and it's going to provide a way around that problem.

And every force has a connection point. A hook. A way of telling that force how much you are affected by it. For the electromagnetic force it's the electric charge. For gravity it's the mass. For the strong nuclear force, physicists had to come up with a new hook. A way for a quark to connect to another quark via that force. And physicists chose the word color.

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Thus if you or a particle you know has this new property called color, then you get to feel the strong nuclear force. Your color can be one of red, green, or blue (confusingly there is also anti-red, anti-green and anti-blue, because of course life isn't that simple). To build a particle like a proton, all the colors of the quarks have to add up to white. Thus one quark gets assigned to be red, the other assigned to be green, and the last assigned to be blue. The particular assignment of color doesn't actually matter (and, in fact, the individual quarks constantly change color), what matters is that they all add up to white and that the strong force can do its work.

This new property of color is what allows the quarks to share a state inside a proton. With color, no two quarks are exactly the same — they now have different colors.

Super strength

Imagine taking two little pliers and grabbing two of the quarks in the proton. You work out, so you are able to overcome the strength of the strong nuclear force holding them together.

But here's something weird about the strong force: It doesn't diminish with distance. Other forces, like gravity and electromagnetism, do. But the strong force stays just as strong as it always is, no matter how far apart those quarks are.

So as you tug on those quarks, you have to keep adding more and more energy to maintain the separation. You eventually add so much energy that, energy being equivalent to mass and all that, new particles appear in the vacuum between the quarks. New particles like … other quarks.

These new quarks almost immediately find their newly separated friends and bind together, tossing all your hard work and sweat away in a single flash of energy before the distance between them is even noticeable. By the time you think you've separated the quarks, they've already found new ones to bind to. This effect is known as quark confinement: The strong force is actually so dang strong that it prevents us from ever seeing a quark in isolation.

It's a shame we'll never get to see what its color is.

Learn more by listening to the episode "What makes the strong force so strong?"on the Ask A Spaceman podcast, available on iTunes and on the Web at http://www.askaspaceman.com. Thanks to Kayja N. and Ter B. for the questions that led to this piece! Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul @PaulMattSutter and facebook.com/PaulMattSutter.

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Earth's magnetic shield defends our planet from the scourges of solar wind and cosmic radiation, making life on our planet possible. But every 10 years or so, it can be a real jerk.

"Geomagnetic jerks" are abrupt changes in the strength of Earth's magnetic field. While some variations in this field are expected to occur gradually, over hundreds to thousands of years, these sudden wobbles in intensity last only a few years at most, and may only alter the Earth's magnetism over specific parts of the world at a time. One of the first jerks documented, for example, briefly warped the field over Western Europe in 1969.

Since then, a new jerk has been detected somewhere in the world every 10 years or so, and scientists still don’t know what's causing them. While many geomagnetic phenomena, including the northern and southern lights, result from electrified solar wind bashing into Earth's magnetosphere, the jerks are thought to originate from deep inside our planet's core, where the magnetic field itself is generated by the constant churn of liquid-hot iron. The exact mechanism of action, however, remains a mystery. [The 8 Biggest Mysteries About Planet Earth]

Now, a new study published today (April 22) in the journal Nature Geoscience offers a potential explanation. According to a new computer model of the core's physical behavior, geomagnetic jerks may be generated by buoyant blobs of molten matter released from deep inside the core.

Who's the jerk?

In the new study, the researchers built a computer model that painstakingly recreates the physical conditions of Earth's outer core, and shows its evolution over several decades. After the equivalent of 4 million hours of calculations (sped up thanks to a French supercomputer), the core simulation was able to generate geomagnetic jerks that closely aligned with actual jerks observed over the last few decades.

These simulated jerks jiggled the magnetosphere every 6 to 12 years in the model — however, the events seemed to originate from buoyant anomalies that formed in the planet's core 25 years earlier. As those blobs of molten matter approached the outer surface of the core, they generated powerful waves that rushed along magnetic field lines near the core and created "sharp changes" in the flow of liquid that governs the planet's magnetosphere, the authors wrote. Eventually, these sudden changes translate into jerky disturbances in the magnetic field high above the planet.

"[Jerks] represent a major obstacle to the prediction of geomagnetic field behavior for years to decades ahead," the authors wrote in their new study. "The ability to numerically reproduce jerks offers a new way to probe the physical properties of Earth’s deep interior."

While it's impossible to confirm this simulation's results with actual observations of the core (it's too hot and high-pressured to get anywhere near our planet's center), having a model that can recreate historical jerks with high accuracy could be helpful in predicting the many jerks yet to come, the researchers wrote.

Knowing when the jerks are coming could also help monitor how they affect other geodynamic processes. For example, is it possible, as one 2013 study in Nature suggested, that the jerks are harbingers of longer days. According to that study, sudden changes in the fluid flow at Earth's core may also alter the planet's spin by the slightest bit, actually adding an extra millisecond to the day every 6 years or so. Periods where Earth's day lengthened seemed to correlate with several established instances of well-known jerks, the researchers reported.

If that's true, and geomagnetic jerks are responsible for a slightly longer workday every few years, at least we know we've given them the right name.

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Originally published on Live Science.

Today's weather forecast on the sun calls for a high of 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,500 degrees Celsius), constant supersonic wind, mysterious eruptions of giant lava-lamp-blobs and, oh yes, light rain. So, you know, pack an umbrella.

As bizarre as it sounds, rain on the sun is a relatively common occurrence. Unlike rain on Earth, where liquid water evaporates, condenses into clouds, then falls back down in droplets after growing sufficiently heavy, solar rain results from the rapid heating and cooling of plasma (the hot, charged gas that comprises the sun).

Scientists expect to see fiery rings of plasma rain rise and fall along the sun's huge, looping magnetic field lines after the eruption of solar flares, which can heat the plasma at the sun's surface from a few thousand to nearly 2 million F (1.1 million C). Now, however, NASA scientists believe they've discovered a completely new structure on the sun that may create days-long rain storms, even without the intense heat of solar flares. [Rainbow Album: The Many Colors of the Sun]

"The ease with which these structures were identified and the frequency of rain during all observations provides compelling support for the conclusion that this is a ubiquitous phenomenon," the authors wrote in the study.

Hunting for molten rain

The detection of these drizzly structures came as a surprise to NASA researcher Emily Mason, who was scouring the SDO footage for signs of rain in massive structures called helmet streamers — 1 million-mile-tall (1.6 million km) magnetic field loops named after a knight's pointy headgear.

These streamers are clearly visible leaping out of the sun's corona, or the outermost part of its atmosphere, during solar eclipses, and seemed as good a place as any to look for solar rain, the researchers wrote. However, Mason couldn't find a trace of falling plasma in any SDO footage of the streamers. What she did see were numerous bright, low, mysterious structures that she and her team later identified as the RNTPs.

The relatively low altitude of the structures may be the most interesting aspect of the results, the researchers wrote. Reaching a maximum of 30,000 miles (50,000 km) over the sun's surface, the RNTPs were only about 2% as tall as the helmet streamers Mason and her team were looking at. That means that whatever process was causing the plasma to heat up and rise along the magnetic field lines was occurring in a much narrower region of the sun’s atmosphere than previously thought.

That means the processes that drive these ubiquitous fountains could help explain one of the enduring mysteries of the sun — why is the sun's atmosphere nearly 300 times hotter than its surface?

"We still don't know exactly what’s heating the corona, but we know it has to happen in this layer," Mason said in a statement.

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Originally published on Live Science.

There are ghostly shapes hidden in magnetic fields.

They're not made of stuff in the way a lightning bolt or a beam of light is. A lighting bolt carries a fairly defined group of electrons from the sky all the way to the ground. Sunshine that hits your face consists mostly of the same photons that traveled millions of miles from the sun.

But magnetic fields contain things called skyrmions that are different from electrons and photons; a skyrmion is a knot of magnetic field lines looping around each other. As it drifts from one spot to the next, a skyrmion makes itself anew out of the magnetic field lines that are already there. The knot holds together because magnetic field lines resist passing through one another. So, while skyrmions are insubstantial and different from objects we're used to thinking about, they act like more tangible things. [9 Cool Facts About Magnets]

Physicists call these skyrmions "quasiparticles," and suspect they could explain phenomena as disparate as ball lightning and the nuclear structure of an atom. Now, in a new paper, researchers showed that skyrmions can be stuffed inside one another, taking on a completely new shape. These puffed-up "skyrmion bags" are fascinating objects in their own right, but the bizarre things might also be useful for futuristic computing, the researchers said.

Stuff 'em in a bag

The team revealed the skyrmion bags in a paper published April 1 in the journal Nature Physics. The result relies on a key similarity between the ghostly quasiparticles and solid matter: the existence of antiparticles.

Just like protons have counterpart antiprotons that annihilate each other on contact with each other, skyrmions have antiskyrmions.

"An antiskyrmion is a skyrmion where all the numbers are reversed," said David Foster, a physicist at the University of Birmingham in England and one of the lead authors of the new study.

So, if a magnetic field line points north in a skyrmion, it would point south in an antiskyrmion. But antiskyrmions and skyrmions powerfully repel one another. That turned out to be the key to building skyrmion bags, the researchers said.

"If I take a skyrmion and I stretch it out a bit and I take an antiskyrmion and place it in the center of it [the skyrmion] … they will not annihilate. It's a stable construction," Foster told Live Science.

What's more, the researchers realized, once a skyrmion has been stretched, you can stuff even more antiskyrmions inside it.

And that realization, Foster said, opened the door again to a six-year-old idea about putting skyrmions to work.

Skyrmion storage

Back in 2013, a trio of researchers proposed a theoretical "skyrmion racetrack memory device" in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

The idea was that the little magnetic patterns might offer a solution to a basic problem in computer design: electricity consumption.

"If you consider an old-fashioned hard drive, which is a sort of spinning disk, it takes a lot of power," Foster said.

The 2013 researchers' proposed low-power replacement would take advantage of the fact that a very small current causes skyrmions on a magnetic surface to scoot along rapidly.

Perhaps, those researchers suggested, if you took a long, thin strip of magnetic material (the racetrack) and loaded it with skyrmions, you could encode data into the magnetic material in gaps between the quasiparticles. A magnetic reader could interpret a long gap between skyrmions as a binary 1 and a short gap as a binary 0, for example.

To retrieve that stored data, then, an electric current could nudge the skyrmions into scooting back and forth under a magnetic reader. It takes very little power to move skyrmions back and forth along a magnetic surface, so the resulting device could be very efficient.

But the idea had some basic problems, Foster said. While skyrmions are fairly stable, the gaps between them aren't. Over time, imperfections in the magnetic strips would muddle the data as the skyrmions moved back and forth.

"Stray magnetic fields come in. And this is like speed bumps which appear and disappear. And with those gaps appearing and disappearing, the gaps between your [skyrmions] will have been lost," Foster said.

How bags could solve the problem

The really interesting thing here, Foster said, is that skyrmion bags don't lose antiskyrmions over time or when they pass over magnetic "speed bumps."

Put a bunch of skyrmion bags on a racetrack device, the researchers in the new study wrote, and a computer could encode and retrieve data based on the number of antiskyrmions in each bag that pass under the reader.

"My colleagues are really excited about the idea that you could also increase data density this way," Foster said. [9 Numbers That Are Cooler Than Pi]

Where conventional computer storage relies on only 1s and 0s, he said, a skyrmion bag system could use 0s, 1s, 2s, 3s and so on. That would open the door to much more complex forms of data encoding that could stuff far more information into a given space than a traditional binary method can.

The liquid-crystal test

No one's yet managed to make a skyrmion bag on a magnetic strip. But after testing the concept using computer simulations, Foster and his team in the U.K. turned to a group of researchers at the University of Colorado to bring the first known skyrmion bags into the world.

Typically, physicists think of skyrmions as things that exist in magnetic fields. But the particles can also exist in other substances, like the liquid crystals — aligned, rigid, rod-like molecules — that fill the screens on your laptop and some cellphones. [Images: Inside the World's Top Physics Labs]

With precision "optical tweezers," the University of Colorado team (headed by the experimentalist Ivan Smalyukh) "drew" skyrmion bags in the liquid crystal, said Jung-Shen Tai, a physics graduate student in the lab.

These skyrmion bags remained indelible in the crystalline substance and visible when the researchers peered at them through microscopes. That (along with the computer simulation) is strong evidence that skyrmion bags would also be stable in magnets, Foster said.

So far, no one's reported building any real-world racetrack storage devices, let alone storage devices relying on skyrmion bags. But such devices are coming, Foster insisted.

"I already know people are working on grants to make these things," he said.

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Originally published on Live Science.

For some creatures, the magnetic field that hugs our planet serves as a compass for navigation or orientation.

Migratory birds, sea turtles and certain types of bacteria are counted among the species with this built-in navigation system. But what about humans? According to a new study, humans can also sense Earth's magnetic field.

The new study, published today (March 18) in the journal eNeuro, provides the first direct evidence, from brain scans, that humans can do so, likely through magnetic particles scattered around the brain.

The ability to detect the magnetic field, called magnetoreception, was first suggested to exist in humans back in the 1980s. But subsequent studies of the brain, from the 1990s, didn't find evidence of the ability. [Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind]

But with access to new data analysis techniques, an international group of researchers decided to take another look.

Manipulating the magnetic field

To study whether humans can sense the magnetic field, 34 adults were asked to sit in a dark test chamber adorned with large, square coils. Electric currents traveled through these coils, changing the magnetic field in the chamber..

The intensity of this magnetic field was about the same as the one that surrounds our planet, said lead study author Connie Wang, a doctoral student at the California Institute of Technology. For comparison, it's about 100,000 times weaker than the ones created by MRI machines, Wang noted.

The participants were told to relax and close their eyes while the researchers manipulated the magnetic field around them. During the experiment, electroencephalogram (EEG) machines measured a type of brainwave called an alpha wave. Alpha waves are known to decrease in amplitude when the brain picks up a signal, whether it be sight, sound … or something magnetic.

The brain responds

Of the 34 participants, brain scans from four individuals showed strong reactions to one change in the magnetic field: a shift from northeast to northwest. This shift would be the same as a person outside the chamber shifting their head quickly from left to right, except the head moves through the static magnetic field rather than the field moving around it. [Earth Quiz: Do You Really Know Your Planet?]

In the four individuals, alpha brain waves decreased in amplitude by as much as 60 percent. But they responded only when the field shifted from northeast to northwest — not in the other direction.

"We weren't really expecting an asymmetrical response," Wang told Live Science. Though it’s unclear why this happened, the researchers think it could be something unique to individuals, just like how some people are right-handed and some left-handed.

Several participants also had a strong response to another set of experiments that shifted the incline of the field, which is what would happen if you traveled between the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

To ensure the results weren't a fluke, the study responders were re-tested several weeks later — and the results held true. Stuart Gilder, a professor of geophysics at the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich who was not part of the new study, said that the repeated findings made the study convincing.

Gilder said that he didn't view the finding that most people couldn't sense the magnetic field as a count against the study, because the ability could be expressed differently in different brains. "Some people are really good at art and some people are really good at math," Gilder told Live Science. Organs don't "have to behave or react in the same way."

Still, the study does raise some additional questions, he noted. For example, how would people perceive the field if they had been lying down, or the magnetic field had been moving slower?

Ancient navigation

It's unclear why some humans seem to be capable of magnetoreception, but in theory, the skill could help with orientation, or be a remnant of an ability that evolved early on to help creatures — even ancient hunter-gatherers — navigate. "Many animals use the Earth's magnetic field for navigation," Wang told Live Science. "There's such a wide range of creatures that have this sense that we think humans, at least, have some remnants of this sense, even if we don't use it so much in our daily lives anymore."

And many questions remain about magnetoreception in general, like how it works. Indeed, scientists have figured out how magnetoreception works in just one type of creature: a type of bacteria called magnetotactic bacteria. These microbes migrate along the field lines of our planet's magnetic field using magnetic particles called magnetite (Fe3O4).

These magnetite particles have been known to exist in the human brain for decades — and were first found by Joseph Kirschvink, a professor of geobiology at Caltech, who is the senior author of the new study.

What’s more, a study published in August 2018 in the journal Scientific Reports from Gilder's group found that these magnetic particles were scattered throughout the human brain. Their widespread presence in the brain suggested that the particles likely served some kind of biological purpose, the authors of that study concluded.

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Editor's Note: This article was updated on March 19 to clarify that magnetic particles aren't confined to a "brain" in microbes. Bacteria are typically made up of single cells and so they do not have brains.

Originally published on Live Science.

When the clock strikes lunar noon, water molecules begin to dance around on the light side of the moon.

As the moon's surface heats up, water molecules detach and find another, cooler spot to hang out until temperatures cool back down, scientists found using data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance orbiter (LRO), which has been circling the moon since 2009.

Water on the surface of the moon exists mainly in two forms: frozen as stretches of ice always shrouded in darkness near the poles and as water molecules scattered across the surface bound to grains in the regolith or soil of the moon, according to a statement. [See Spectacular Lunar Mission Images in 3D (Photos)]

Aboard the LRO is a UV spectrograph, an instrument that measures UV light (from the sun) that's reflected off the surface of the moon. By splitting the reflected UV light into different wavelengths, the instrument creates a "spectrum" of light that differs based on the kind of material the light hits first. When water is present, the instrument detects a different spectrum of light than when it's not.

During the day, the surface of the moon heats up with peak temperatures at around noon on the moon. As a result, the water molecules detach from the regolith, become gaseous and migrate to colder areas where they are more stable — both to nearby, colder regions on the surface and up into the thin atmosphere. Later in the day, as temperatures drop again, the molecules come back and reattach to the surface regolith. The team found that this was mostly true in more hilly regions called the moon's highlands.

What's more, the data from the LRO poked a hole in a theory about how water molecules arrived at the moon in the first place. One idea is that hydrogen ions rain onto the moon from incoming solar winds and interact with the oxygen from iron oxide in the regolith, forming water molecules, or H2O.

But if that's the case, when the moon is shielded from solar winds — when it rotates such that Earth directly blocks the wind — the quantity of that water should decrease. They found that even when the moon was shielded, the quantity of water molecules didn't change. This suggests that lunar water builds up over time and doesn't directly come from solar wind, according to the statement.

However, they can't rule out the possibility that what they're detecting with their spectrograph is indeed water and not a similar wavelength from a one-hydrogen-less molecule called hydrogen oxide, they reported in their new study, published March 8 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

"These results aid in understanding the lunar water cycle and will ultimately help us learn about accessibility of water that can be used by humans in future missions to the Moon," lead author Amanda Hendrix, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, said in the statement.

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Originally published on Live Science.

A gigantic solar storm hit Earth about 2,600 years ago, one about 10 times stronger than any solar storm recorded in the modern day, a new study finds.

These findings suggest that such explosions recur regularly in Earth's history, and could wreak havoc if they were to hit now, given how dependent the world has become on electricity.

The sun can bombard Earth with explosions of highly energetic particles known as solar proton events. These "proton storms" can endanger people and electronics both in space and in the air. [Top 10 Greatest Explosions Ever]

In addition, when a proton storm hits Earth's magnetosphere — the shell of electrically charged particles — it is trapped by Earth's magnetic field. When the solar storm causes a disturbance in our planet's magnetosphere, it's called a geomagnetic storm which can wreak devastation on power grids across the planet. For example, in 1989, a solar outburst blacked out the entire Canadian province of Quebec within seconds, damaging transformers as far away as New Jersey, and nearly shutting down U.S. power grids from the mid-Atlantic through the Pacific Northwest.

Scientists have analyzed proton storms for less than a century. As such, they may not have good estimates of how often extreme solar eruptions happen or how powerful they can actually get.

"Today, we have a lot of infrastructure that could be badly damaged, and we travel in air and space where we are much more exposed to high-energy radiation," senior study author Raimund Muscheler an environmental physicist at Lund University in Sweden, told Live Science.

The so-called Carrington Event of 1859 may have released about 10 times more energy than the one behind the Quebec blackout in 1989, making it the most powerful known geomagnetic storm , according to a 2013 study from Lloyd's of London. Worse yet, the world has become far more dependent on electricity since the Carrington Event, and if a similarly powerful geomagnetic storm were to hit now, power outages might last weeks, months or even years as utilities struggle to replace key parts of power grids, the 2013 study found.

Now, researchers have found radioactive atoms trapped within ice in Greenland that suggest an enormous proton storm struck Earth in about 660 B.C., one that might dwarf the Carrington Event.

Previous research found that extreme proton storms can generate radioactive atoms of beryllium-10, chlorine-36 and carbon-14 in the atmosphere. Evidence of such events is detectable in tree rings and ice cores, potentially giving scientists a way to investigate ancient solar activity.

The scientists examined ice from two core samples taken from Greenland. They noted a spike of radioactive beryllium-10 and chlorine-36 about 2,610 years ago. This matches prior work examining tree rings that suggested a spike of carbon-14 about the same time. [Photos: Craters Hidden Beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet]

Previous research detected two other ancient proton storms in a similar manner — one happened about A.D. 993-994, and the other about A.D. 774-775. The latter is the largest solar eruption known to date.

Regarding number of high-energy protons, the 660 B.C. and the A.D. 774-775 events are about 10 times larger than the strongest proton storm seen in the modern day, which occurred in 1956, Muscheler said. The A.D. 993-994 event was smaller than the other two ancient storms by about a factor of two to three, he added.

It remains unclear how these ancient proton storms compared with the Carrington Event, since estimates of the number of protons from the Carrington Event are very uncertain, Muscheler said. However, if these ancient solar outbursts "were connected with a geomagnetic storm, I would assume that they would exceed the worst-case scenarios that are often based on Carrington-type events," he noted.

Although more research is needed to see how much damage such eruptions might inflict, this work suggests "these enormous events are a recurring feature of the sun — we now have three big events during the past 3,000 years," Muscheler said. "There might be more that we have not yet discovered."

"We need to search systematically for these events in the environmental archives to get a good idea about the statistics — that is, the risks — for such events and also smaller events," Muscheler added. "The challenge will be to find the smaller ones that probably still exceed anything we measured in recent decades."

The scientists detailed their findings online today (March 11) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Originally published on Live Science.

Hanging over the scruff of Ursa Major's neck some 12 million light-years from Earth, a cluster of young stars known as the Cigar Galaxy is puffing epic amounts of wind into deep space.

This intergalactic stogie isn't just blowing hot air. The Cigar Galaxy is a starburst galaxy, meaning new stars are born in its action-packed center remarkably quickly — at least 10 times faster than in the Milky Way, according to NASA. In order to grow, all those bright young fireballs eject gargantuan amounts of gas and dust into space, taking the form of an incredibly powerful galactic wind that could help transmit the building blocks of galaxies to distant parts of the universe. [Spaced Out! 101 Astronomy Images That Will Blow Your Mind]

In a study published Jan. 4 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, NASA scientists weighed that wind to better understand how gas and dust — two ingredients for making newborn stars — enter into extragalactic space and influence the formation of new galaxies. Using an airborne infrared telescope, the astronomers counted pixels of dust in the faraway galaxy to estimate that roughly 50 million to 60 million suns' worth of mass were caught up in the Cigar Galaxy's mighty celestial wind.

That's a lot of gas and dust — and according to the new study, it was all aligned on the galaxy's magnetic field lines, which were also being dragged by the wind thousands of light-years into outer space. This marks the first observational evidence that massive galactic winds can actually pull a galaxy's magnetic field along with it, the researchers said.

"One of the main objectives of this research was to evaluate how efficiently the galactic wind can drag along the magnetic field," study co-author Enrique Lopez-Rodriguez, a Universities Space Research Association scientist, said in a statement. "We did not expect to find the magnetic field to be aligned with the wind over such a large area."

According to the researchers, these results suggest that the powerful winds gushing out of busy, star-forming centers like the Cigar Galaxy could be one of the chief mechanisms that spread stellar ingredients into undeveloped regions of space, along with a magnetic field to help shape them. Further study of the Cigar Galaxy — which is the closest starburst galaxy to Earth — could help astronomers understand the earliest galaxy formations at the start of the universe.

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Originally published on Live Science.

Imagine a bar magnet inside Earth, more or less aligned with the axis, where the ends of that magnet lie close to the geographic North and South poles of the planet. The magnetic field lines travel from the north pole of the magnet, looping back around to go back in toward the south pole. At each pole, the magnetic field lines are nearly vertical.

While there is definitely not a magnetic bar inside Earth, the same phenomenon occurs around the Earth, creating a protective area around the entire planet called the magnetosphere, according to NASA. Earth's magnetosphere protects us from harmful cosmic radiation and solar wind and is responsible for the beautiful auroral displays seen at the high latitudes of the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

Earth's magnetic and geographic poles are situated opposite of one another. In other words, Earth's magnetic south pole is actually near the geographic North Pole. So when we use a compass to determine our location, the compass needle actually points toward the south magnetic pole when in the Northern Hemisphere and toward the north magnetic pole in the Southern Hemisphere.

The magnetic poles aren't fixed and wander a bit across the surface of the planet with respect to the geographic poles. About 75 percent of the intensity of Earth's magnetic field is represented by the "magnetic bar." The other 25 percent of the intensity of Earth's magnetic field, which can be thought of as smaller bar magnets that are moving around, comes from smaller portions of moving magma and may be what allows the poles to move.

Based on data released by the National Centers for Environmental Information in February 2019, the magnetic north pole is located at 86.54 N 170.88 E, within the Arctic Ocean and heading from Canada toward Siberia. The magnetic south pole is located at 64.13 S 136.02 E, just off the coast of Antarctica in the direction of Australia.

Where does the field come from?

While still a bit of a mystery, scientists generally agree that the magnetic field of the Earth starts deep in the core of the planet. The outer core of the planet is made up of molten metals, primarily iron, which is a conductor.

"Churning, molten metal in the outer core generates the [magnetic] field by what is known as dynamo action," said Aleksey Smirnov, a geophysics professor at Michigan Technological University.

Dynamo action, or the dynamo theory, describes the way a planet can sustain a magnetic field. The dynamo, or source of the magnetic field, is created by a rotating, convecting and electrically conducting material, such as the molten iron inside the Earth.

"There are a lot of ionized atoms and free electrons roaming around, plus there is a complex form of convection going on in the interior, combined with Earth's natural rotation — there are a lot of moving charges," said Doug Ingram, a physics and astronomy professor at Texas Christian University.

Scientists believe that the charges created by the moving metallic material move around Earth's equatorial region in a circular motion which generates the north and south magnetic poles at the surface, said Ingram.

Why do the poles move?

Earth's dynamo is persistent, but unstable. Right now, the magnetic field is rapidly changing, with the magnetic north pole making a sudden jump toward Siberia. Since the 1990s, the magnetic north pole has shifted about 35 miles (55 km) per year, on average, according to a 2019 study published in the journal Nature.

Disturbances in the flowing, metallic magma might be the cause of the instabilities in the magnetic field which may lead to such pole shifts, according to Smirnov. The movement of the liquid iron deep under Canada may slightly weaken the magnetic field in that location, which is what's allowing the north magnetic pole to move toward Siberia, the Nature article states.

Other electromagnetic anomalies can be seen all over the world, such as in southern Africa where a magnetic field disturbance, similar to an eddy in a stream, may be caused by a denser portion of the mantle near the boundary with the planet's liquid outer core.

History of pole shifting and reversal

While the poles are constantly shifting, they have also completely reversed at least a few hundred times within the last 3 billion years, according to NASA. During this process, which typically occurs every 200,000 to 300,000 years over the course of 100 to a few thousand years at a time, the magnetic field becomes squashed and pulled with multiple poles sprouting up randomly over the surface of the Earth. The last full reversal occurred about 780,000 years ago.

The history of the magnetic field, including shifts and reversals, is evidenced in the geologic record. Metals found in rocks, including iron, align with the magnetic field before molten rocks solidify or as fragments that contain the magnetic metals aligned with the magnetic field and settle in layers of sedimentary rocks.

"Since the Earth is a dynamic and ever-changing place, new rocks, and their magnetic records, have been generated constantly throughout geologic time," Smirnov said, adding that these records can be preserved for millions or billions of years.

Similar records are found on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean where new seafloor is constantly being created at the mid-Atlantic ridge.

"As the lava wells up to the surface [through the long crack that makes up the ridge], it is molten, and the iron particles suspended in the lava orient themselves in the direction of Earth's prevailing magnetic field," Ingram said. As the lava solidifies, it locks the metal deposits in place, and thus, creates a historic record of the shifts and reversals of Earth's magnetic field.

What do these wandering and flipping poles mean for life on our planet? There are no drastic changes present in the fossil record for either plant or animal life during both shifts and reversals, according to NASA, which suggests that the effects of pole reversal on life are minimal. Although, there is some speculation among scientists that during periods of decreased magnetic field strength, more cosmic radiation could have reached Earth's surface and caused an increased rate of genetic mutation and therefore, gave evolution a boost, Smirnov said.

Additional resources:

• Watch this cool visualization of Earth's magnetosphere from NASA's Scientific Visualization Lab.
• Learn about NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale mission to understand how the magnetic fields around Earth connect and disconnect.
• Check out these maps of the historical locations of the wandering magnetic poles from the National Centers for Environmental Information.

Some regions of the lunar surface exhibit a distinctive pattern of darker and lighter swirls. Using NASA's ARTEMIS mission — which stands for Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of the Moon's Interaction with the Sun — astronomers have revealed new clues about the origin of these swirls. 

The sun releases a constant flow of charged particles known as solar wind into space. While Earth's natural magnetic field deflects solar-wind particles, the moon has a weaker magnetic field, leaving some areas of the lunar surface exposed to the sun's damaging radiation, according to a statement from NASA. 

Related: This NASA Video Tour of the Moon in 4K Is Simply Breathtaking

Unlike Earth, the moon doesn't have a global magnetic field. Rather, magnetized rocks near the lunar surface create small, localized magnetic fields that extend only a short distance, according to the statement. 

"The magnetic fields in some regions [of the moon] are locally acting as this magnetic sunscreen," Andrew Poppe, a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, said in the statement. 

These small "bubbles" of protection deflect some of the damaging solar-wind particles. As a result, light-colored swirls form in the shielded areas. However, the bordering areas become noticeably darker. 

"You know, sometimes you put on sunscreen and you miss a tiny little bit and then you have a really bright red spot on you your skin where you missed it," Poppe said in a NASA videoexplaining the discovery. "That's, in some ways, the analogy for the region of the moon that is extra exposed."

The team hopes the findings will help protect astronauts from the harmful effects of radiation during future missions to the moon. Although the moon's crustal magnetic fields may not be strong enough alone to protect astronauts, it may be possible to create a stronger magnetic field artificially, Poppe said in the video. 

• This NASA Video of the Moon's Lunar Landmarks Is Simply Amazing
• NASA's Stunning Photo of the Moon Will Make You Swoon
• What Moon Craters Can Tell Us About Earth, and Our Solar System

Follow Samantha Mathewson @Sam_Ashley13. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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