Solar Flare News

June 25, 2025

Top Headlines

Mojave Lichen Defies Death Rays—could Life Thrive on Distant Exoplanets?

June 24, 2025 — Lichen from the Mojave Desert has stunned scientists by surviving months of lethal UVC radiation, suggesting life could exist on distant planets orbiting volatile stars. The secret? A microscopic “sunscreen” layer that protects their vital ...

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 ...

Why Are Some Rocks on the Moon Highly Magnetic?

May 23, 2025 — Scientists may have solved the mystery of why the moon shows ancient signs of magnetism although it has no magnetic field today. An impact, such as from a large asteroid, could have generated a cloud of ionized particles that briefly enveloped the ...

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 ...

The Squid Galaxy's Neutrino Game Just Leveled Up

May 8, 2025 — In space, energetic neutrinos are usually paired with energetic gamma rays. Galaxy NGC 1068, however, emits strong neutrinos and weak gamma rays, which presents a puzzle for scientists to solve. A new paper posits that helium nuclei collide with ...

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 ...

Scientists Discover How Stellar-Mass Black Holes Emit Powerful Plasma Jets

Apr. 21, 2025 — Scientists have discovered key conditions needed for a stellar black hole to create plasma jets. Their findings show that when superheated gas material experiences a rapid shrinkage towards the black hole, jet formation ...

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: ...

From Boring to Bursting: Giant Black Hole Awakens

Apr. 11, 2025 — Astronomers are investigating the longest and most energetic bursts of X-rays seen from a newly awakened black hole. Watching this strange behavior unfold in real time offers a unique opportunity to learn more about these powerful events and the ...

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 ...

Latest Headlines

updated 12:29pm 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 ...

Biggest Boom Since the Big Bang? Astronomers Record 25x Supernova Brightness

June 18, 2025 — Astronomers have identified a new kind of cosmic explosion extreme nuclear transients so powerful they outshine typical supernovae by orders of ...

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 ...

Insight from One of Milky Way's Most Extreme Environments

Apr. 2, 2025 — In new images, scientists have gotten the closest look yet at Sagittarius C -- a 'stellar nursery' where clouds of gas and dust have collapsed to form thousands of new ...

New DESI Results Strengthen Hints That Dark Energy May Evolve

Mar. 20, 2025 — The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument used millions of galaxies and quasars to build the largest 3D map of our universe to date. Combining their data with other experiments shows signs that the ...

Meteorites: A Geologic Map of the Asteroid Belt

Mar. 18, 2025 — Where do meteorites of different type come from? In a review paper, astronomers trace the impact orbit of observed meteorite falls to several previously unidentified source regions in the asteroid ...

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 ...

NASA's Hubble Finds Kuiper Belt Duo May Be Trio

Mar. 4, 2025 — The puzzle of predicting how three gravitationally bound bodies move in space has challenged mathematicians for centuries, and has most recently been popularized in the novel and television show ...

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 ...

Einstein Probe Catches X-Ray Odd Couple

Feb. 18, 2025 — Lobster-eye satellite Einstein Probe captured the X-ray flash from a very elusive celestial pair. The discovery opens a new way to explore how massive stars interact and evolve, confirming the unique ...

Phoenix Galaxy Cluster in the Act of Extreme Cooling

Feb. 13, 2025 — New findings explain the Phoenix cluster's mysterious starburst. Data confirm the cluster is actively cooling and able to generate a huge amount of stellar fuel on its ...

Dwarf Planet Ceres: Building Blocks of Life Delivered from Space

Jan. 27, 2025 — The dwarf planet is a bizarre, cryovolcanic world. However, the organic deposits discovered on its surface so far are unlikely to originate from its interior. The organic material found in a few ...

New Measurements of Solar Radiative Opacity Thanks to Helioseismology

Jan. 27, 2025 — Researchers have pioneered an innovative method using helioseismology to measure the solar radiative opacity under extreme conditions. This groundbreaking work not only reveals gaps in our ...

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

Jan. 15, 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 ...

X-Ray Flashes from a Nearby Supermassive Black Hole Accelerate Mysteriously

Jan. 13, 2025 — Astronomers observed flashes of X-rays coming from a supermassive black hole at a steadily increasing clip. The source could be the core of a dead star that's teetering at the black hole's ...

'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 ...

Physicists Explain a Stellar Stream's Distinctive Features

Jan. 6, 2025 — Physicists have proposed a solution to a long-standing puzzle surrounding the GD-1 stellar stream, one of the most well-studied streams within the galactic halo of the Milky ...

Research May Boost Next-Generation Space Rockets

Jan. 3, 2025 — Hidden patterns in electric propulsion plasma beams could help ensure the success of long-term space ...

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

Dec. 19, 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 -- ...

Survey of 26,000 Dead Stars Confirms Key Details of Extreme Stellar Behavior

Dec. 18, 2024 — A study of more than 26,000 white dwarf stars has confirmed a long-predicted but elusive effect in these ultra-dense, dying stars: Hotter white dwarfs are slightly puffier than cooler ones, even when ...

Does the Exoplanet Trappist-1 B Have an Atmosphere After All?

Dec. 16, 2024 — Recent measurements with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) cast doubt on the current understanding of the exoplanet Trappist-1 b's nature. Until now, it was assumed to be a dark rocky planet ...

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 an image of the supermassive black hole at the ...

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 ...

A New Discovery About the Source of the Vast Energy in Cosmic Rays

Dec. 10, 2024 — New research suggests that these ultra-high energy rays derive their energy from magnetic ...

NASA's Hubble Celebrates Decade of Tracking Outer Planets

Dec. 9, 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 predicting when extreme weather might erupt on the Red ...

Astronomers Find the Smallest Asteroids Ever Detected in the Main Belt

Dec. 9, 2024 — Astronomers have found a way to spot the smallest, 'decameter,' asteroids within the main asteroid belt. They used their approach to detect more than 100 new asteroids, ranging from the ...