Northern Lights News

June 25, 2025

Top Headlines

Particles Energized by Magnetic Reconnection in the Nascent Solar Wind

June 3, 2025 — Scientists have identified a new source of energetic particles near the Sun. These definitive observations were made by instruments aboard NASA's Parker Solar Probe, which detected the powerful phenomena as the spacecraft dipped in and out of the ...

'Raindrops in the Sun's Corona': New Adaptive Optics Shows Stunning Details of Our Star's Atmosphere

May 27, 2025 — Scientists have produced the finest images of the Sun's corona to date. To make these high-resolution images and movies, the team developed a new 'coronal adaptive optics' system that removes blur ...

Dark Matter Formed When Fast Particles Slowed Down and Got Heavy, New Theory Says

May 15, 2025 — Researchers propose a new theory for the origin of dark matter, the invisible substance thought to give the universe its shape and structure. Their mathematical models show that dark matter could ...

Stellar Collapse and Explosions Distribute Gold Throughout the Universe

May 7, 2025 — Magnetar flares, colossal cosmic explosions, may be directly responsible for the creation and distribution of heavy elements across the universe, suggests a new ...

The Heart of World's Largest Solar Telescope Begins to Beat

Apr. 25, 2025 — The world's largest solar telescope has reached an important milestone. The data published now were obtained during the technical commissioning of the ...

On Jupiter, It's Mushballs All the Way Down

Apr. 15, 2025 — Observations of Jupiter show that ammonia is unevenly distributed in the upper atmosphere, against expectations of uniform mixing. Scientists found evidence for a complicated but apparently real process associated with fierce lightning storms: ...

Scientists Source Solar Emissions With Largest-Ever Concentration of Rare Helium Isotope

Apr. 9, 2025 — The NASA/ESA Solar Orbiter recently recorded the highest-ever concentration of a rare helium isotope (3He) emitted from the Sun. A Southwest Research Institute-led team of scientists sought the ...

Mysterious Phenomenon at Center of Galaxy Could Reveal New Kind of Dark Matter

Mar. 10, 2025 — A mysterious phenomenon at the center of our galaxy could be the result of a different type of dark ...

Flickers and Flares: Milky Way's Central Black Hole Constantly Bubbles With Light

Feb. 18, 2025 — Astrophysicists have observed our central supermassive black hole. They found the accretion disk is constantly emitting flares without periods of rest. Shorter, faint flares and longer, bright flares ...

Fresh, Direct Evidence for Tiny Drops of Quark-Gluon Plasma

Jan. 16, 2025 — A new analysis of data from the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) reveals fresh evidence that collisions of even very small nuclei with large ones might create tiny specks of a quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Scientists ...

'What Is That?' Scientists Explain White Patch That Appears Near Northern Lights

Jan. 10, 2025 — A whitish, grey patch that sometimes appears in the night sky alongside the northern lights has now been ...

First Results from 2021 Rocket Launch Shed Light on Aurora's Birth

Dec. 20, 2024 — Scientist have begun to reveal the particle-level processes that create the type of auroras that dance rapidly across the sky. The Kinetic-scale Energy and momentum Transport experiment -- KiNET-X -- lifted off from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in ...

Latest Headlines

updated 12:28pm EDT

Sharpest-Ever Solar View Shows Tiny Stripes Driving Big Space Storms

June 22, 2025 — A stunning breakthrough in solar physics reveals ultra-fine magnetic structures on the Sun's surface, thanks to the NSF's Inouye Solar Telescope. Researchers captured never-before-seen bright and ...

Magnetic Mayhem at the Sun’s Poles: First Images Reveal a Fiery Mystery

June 16, 2025 — For the first time in history, we re seeing the Sun from an angle no one ever has: from above and below its poles. Thanks to the European Space Agency s Solar Orbiter and its tilted orbit, scientists ...

Sun’s Secret Storms Exposed: NASA's Codex Unveils a Turbulent Corona

June 11, 2025 — NASA s CODEX experiment aboard the International Space Station is revealing the Sun like never before. Using advanced filters and a specialized coronagraph, CODEX has captured images showing that the ...

Sun Unleashes Monster Solar Storm: Rare G4 Alert Issued for Earth

June 10, 2025 — A violent solar eruption on May 31 launched a coronal mass ejection (CME) hurtling toward Earth, triggering a rare G4-level geomagnetic storm alert. Captured in real-time by U.S. Naval Research ...

Scientist Discovers How Solar Events Affect the Velocity of Helium Pickup Ions

May 22, 2025 — Scientists have discovered how solar activity affects the velocity distribution and evolution of helium pickup ...

Astrophysicists Capture Astonishing Images of Gamma-Ray Flare from Supermassive Black Hole M87

Dec. 13, 2024 — The galaxy M87, located in the Virgo constellation, provided the first-ever photo of a black hole in 2019, when the Event Horizon Telescope captured ...

Superflares Once Per Century

Dec. 12, 2024 — Stars similar to the Sun produce a gigantic outburst of radiation on average about once every hundred years per star. Such superflares release more energy than a trillion hydrogen bombs and make all ...

NASA's Hubble Celebrates Decade of Tracking Outer Planets

Dec. 10, 2024 — A NASA Hubble Space Telescope observation program called OPAL (Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy) obtains long-term baseline observations of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune in order to understand ...

Mars' Infamous Dust Storms Can Engulf the Entire Planet: A New Study Examines How

Dec. 9, 2024 — Dust storms on Mars could one day pose dangers to human astronauts, damaging equipment and burying solar panels. New research gets closer to ...

Researchers Use Data from Citizen Scientists to Uncover the Mysteries of a Blue Low-Latitude Aurora

Dec. 6, 2024 — Colorful auroras appeared around Japan's Honshu and Hokkaido islands on May 11, 2024, sparked by an intense magnetic storm. Usually, auroras observed ...

Magnetic Tornado Is Stirring Up the Haze at Jupiter's Poles

Nov. 26, 2024 — Dark ovals in Jupiter's polar haze, visible only at UV wavelengths, were first noticed 25 years ago, then ignored. A new study shows that these dark UV ovals are common, appearing at the south ...

Most Energetic Cosmic-Ray Electrons and Positrons Ever Observed

Nov. 25, 2024 — Scientists have recently identified electrons and positrons with the highest energies ever recorded on Earth. They provide evidence of cosmic processes emitting colossal amounts of energy, the ...

NASA, NOAA: Sun Reaches Maximum Phase in 11-Year Solar Cycle

Oct. 15, 2024 — Experts have announced that the Sun has reached its solar maximum period, which could continue for the next year. Scientists will not be able to determine the exact peak of this solar maximum period ...

Researchers Find Clues to the Mysterious Heating of the Sun's Atmosphere

Oct. 11, 2024 — Researchers have made a significant advancement in understanding the underlying heating mechanism of the sun's atmosphere, finding that reflected plasma waves could drive the heating of coronal ...

Lightning Strikes Kick Off a Game of Electron Pinball in Space

Oct. 10, 2024 — When lightning cracks on Earth, especially high-energy electrons may fall out of Earth's inner radiation belt, according to a new study -- an electron 'rain' that could threaten ...

A New Era of Solar Observation

Oct. 3, 2024 — For the first time, scientists have taken near-daily measurements of the Sun's global coronal magnetic field, a region of the Sun that has only been observed irregularly in the past. The ...

Magnetic Field Maps of the Sun's Corona

Sep. 11, 2024 — Astronomers have achieved a major breakthrough in solar physics by successfully producing detailed maps of the Sun's coronal magnetic fields. This milestone promises to enhance our understanding ...

New Heaviest Exotic Antimatter Nucleus

Aug. 21, 2024 — Scientists studying the tracks of particles streaming from six billion collisions of atomic nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) -- an 'atom smasher' that recreates the ...

Scientists Pin Down the Origins of the Moon's Tenuous Atmosphere

Aug. 2, 2024 — Scientists say they have identified the main process that formed the moon's atmosphere and continues to sustain it today. The team reports that the lunar atmosphere is primarily a product of ...

Early Riser! The Sun Is Already Starting Its Next Solar Cycle -- Despite Being Halfway Through Its Current One

July 19, 2024 — The first rumblings of the Sun's next 11-year solar cycle have been detected in sound waves inside our home star -- even though it is only halfway through its current one. This existing cycle is ...

New Dawn for Space Storm Alerts Could Help Shield Earth's Tech

July 19, 2024 — Space storms could soon be forecasted with greater accuracy than ever before thanks to a big leap forward in our understanding of exactly when a violent solar eruption may hit Earth. Scientists say ...

Guiding Humanity Beyond the Moon

June 24, 2024 — What actually happens to the human body in space? While scientists and researchers have heavily researched how various factors impact the human body here on Earth, the amount of information available ...

Mystery of 'Slow' Solar Wind Unveiled by Solar Orbiter Mission

May 28, 2024 — Scientists have come a step closer to identifying the mysterious origins of the 'slow' solar wind, using data collected during the Solar Orbiter spacecraft's first close journey to the ...

New Discoveries About Jupiter's Magnetosphere

May 6, 2024 — New discoveries about Jupiter could lead to a better understanding of Earth's own space environment and influence a long-running scientific debate about the solar system's largest ...

Eruption of Mega-Magnetic Star Lights Up Nearby Galaxy

Apr. 24, 2024 — While ESA's satellite INTEGRAL was observing the sky, it spotted a burst of gamma-rays -- high-energy photons -- coming from the nearby galaxy M82. Only a few hours later, ESA's XMM-Newton ...

AI and Physics Combine to Reveal the 3D Structure of a Flare Erupting Around a Black Hole

Apr. 22, 2024 — Based on radio telescope data and models of black hole physics, a team has used neural networks to reconstruct a 3D image that shows how explosive flare-ups in the disk of gas around our supermassive ...

Astronomers Uncover Methane Emission on a Cold Brown Dwarf

Apr. 17, 2024 — Astronomers have discovered methane emission on a brown dwarf, an unexpected finding for such a cold and isolated world. The findings suggest that this brown dwarf might generate aurorae similar to ...

Persistent Hiccups in a Far-Off Galaxy Draw Astronomers to New Black Hole Behavior

Mar. 27, 2024 — Astronomers have found that a previously quiet black hole, which sits at the center of a galaxy about 800 million light years away, has suddenly erupted, giving off plumes of gas every 8.5 days ...

Secrets of the Van Allen Belt Revealed in New Study

Mar. 21, 2024 — A challenge to space scientists to better understand our hazardous near-Earth space environment has been set in a new ...

Juno Spacecraft Measures Oxygen Production on Jupiter's Moon, Europa

Mar. 5, 2024 — NASA's Juno spacecraft has directly measured charged oxygen and hydrogen molecules from the atmosphere of one of Jupiter's largest moons, Europa. These observations provide key constraints ...