Add Popular Science (opens in a new tab) More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results.

A powerful solar storm arrived last May and pushed Earth’s protective systems harder than anything seen in more than twenty years. When waves of charged material erupted from the Sun and slammed into ...

An international team of space scientists reports that the moon exerts a tidal impact on the plasmasphere. For their paper published in the journal Nature Physics, the group used data from multiple ...

Stephen has degrees in science (Physics major) and arts (English Literature and the History and Philosophy of Science), as well as a Graduate Diploma in Science Communication. Stephen has degrees in ...

The presence of a “space wind” in the plasmasphere of the Earth has been detected for the first time, according to a physicist in France. The direct observation of this “plasmaspheric wind” – ...

A geomagnetic superstorm is an extreme space weather event that occurs when the sun releases massive amounts of energy and charged particles toward Earth. These storms are rare, occurring about once ...

Visitors watch the solar system models at the astronomical museum in Pingtang during summer vacation in southwest China's Guizhou Province. (Xinhua/Yang Wenbin) A team of Chinese scientists and their ...

as an airless vacuum, it is by no means empty. Spacecraft such as Cluster are built to detect and study the sparse ‘soup’ of electrified plasma — mostly electrons and protons — that populates ...

In the last years, electron density profile functions characterized by a linear dependence on the scale height showed good results when approximating the topside ionosphere. The performance above 800 ...

Earth’s plasmasphere and why it matters Earth’s plasmasphere is a torus of cold, dense plasma that co-rotates with the planet and sits inside the broader magnetosphere, roughly aligned with the ...