In recent years astronomers have spotted signs that the jets of plasma particles fired out from supermassive black holes can actually change direction over time – and new research now shows the phenomenon can occur over a shockingly short time scale.

These jets are caused when heated material falling towards a black hole is channeled by powerful magnetic fields towards its poles and streamed back out into the cosmos. These beams of energy are thought to play an important role in star formation, so we need to know how they work.

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This is a composite image, of photos taken at exposures ranging from .001 seconds up to 4 seconds. I am particularly struck by the filaments reaching out from the Sun. Each planet is connected to the Sun through these filaments. Matter, energy, and information are transferred out and back through these filaments, and much else we will learn about in the future. We have known about these coronal filaments for decades, but only recently learned that they stretch out through the solar system.

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Or click here to read the printed essay from the same author.

The sun has a powerful magnetic field that creates sunspots on the star’s surface and unleashes solar storms such as the one that bathed much of the planet in beautiful auroras this month.

But exactly how that magnetic field is generated inside the sun is a puzzle that has vexed astronomers for centuries, going back to the time of Italian astronomer Galileo, who made the first observations of sunspots in the early 1600s, and noticed how they varied over time.

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A nanoscale project represents a giant leap forward in understanding the human brain.

With more than 1.4 petabytes of electron microscopy imaging data, a team of scientists has reconstructed a teeny-tiny cubic segment of the human brain.

It’s just a millimeter on each side – but 57,000 cells, 150 million synapses, and 230 millimeters of ultrafine veins are all packed into that microscopic space.It’s just a millimeter on each side – but 57,000 cells, 150 million synapses, and 230 millimeters of ultrafine veins are all packed into that microscopic space.

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It’s that time of the year again when we gaze with wonder upon some of the world’s best images of our home, the Milky Way galaxy. Dan Zafra emailed us with the release of the top 25 images he curated for 2024. Dan is editor of the travel photography blog Capture the Atlas, which focuses on landscape and astrophotography. The 25 winning Milky Way photos come from 15 different countries.

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In a world that seems to be switching focus from the Hubble Space Telescope to the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble still reminds us it’s there.

Another amazing image has been released that shows the triple-star system HP Tau, HP Tau G2, and HP Tau G3.

The stars in this wonderful system are young, HP Tau for example is so young that it hasn’t started to fuse hydrogen yet and is only 10 million years old!

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The detailed mechanics of how matter falls down onto a black hole from outside the event horizon have been revealed in a new paper.

As predicted by Einstein’s theory of gravity, there’s a point at which material stops circling the black hole and falls straight down, plunging precipitously beyond the point of no return.

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• Water has been gradually escaping Venus’ atmosphere for billions of years. Now scientists think they know why.
• A new study shows the molecule HCO+ may be responsible. Electrons in the atmosphere split the HCO+ ions in two, allowing hydrogen atoms – the H in H2O – from Venus’ atmosphere to escape into space.

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Omega Centauri, the largest known globular star cluster of the Milky Way, contains about 10 million stars. This behemoth, also known as NGC 5139, has a diameter of about 150 light-years. And, it’s 10 times more massive than a typical globular cluster. However, despite all these stars, scientists released a study in 2018 that said Omega Centauri probably is not home to life.

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