News by Subject Space & Planetary

University of Adelaide research has for the first time statistically proven that the earliest standing stone monuments of Britain, the great circles, were constructed specifically in line with the movements of the Sun and Moon, 5000 years ago.

An interplanetary shock struck the outermost of Earth's Van Allen radiation belts on March 17, 2015, resulting in the greatest geomagnetic storm of the past 10 years.

Brown dwarfs are smaller than stars, but more massive than giant planets. As such, they provide a natural link between astronomy and planetary science. However, they also show incredible variation when it comes to size, temperature, chemistry, and more, which makes them difficult to understand, too. New work surveyed various properties of 152 suspected young brown dwarfs in order to categorize their diversity and found that atmospheric properties may be behind much of their differences.

A solar storm that jammed radar and radio communications at the height of the Cold War could have led to a disastrous military conflict if not for the US Air Force's budding efforts to monitor the sun's activity, a new study finds.

A major revision is required in our understanding of our Milky Way Galaxy according to an international team led by Professor Noriyuki Matsunaga of the University of Tokyo. The Japanese, South African and Italian astronomers find that there is a huge region around the center of our own galaxy, which is devoid of young stars. The team publish their work in a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, along with other telescopes on the ground and in space, have discovered a new type of exotic binary star: in the system AR Scorpii a rapidly spinning white dwarf star is powering electrons up to almost the speed of light. These high energy particles release blasts of radiation that lash the companion red dwarf star, and cause the entire system to pulse dramatically every 1.97 minutes with radiation ranging from the ultraviolet to radio.

New research from the University of Warwick finds a new type of exotic binary star, in which a rapidly-spinning burnt-out stellar remnant called a white dwarf sweeps powerful beams of particles and radiation over its nearby companion star, causing it to pulse across almost the entire electromagnetic spectrum from the ultraviolet to radio.