aurora
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Webb Telescope Finds What May Be a Glowing Aurora on a Failed Star
The Webb Space Telescope has spotted something weird: a brown dwarf with what appear to be aurorae, what we Earthlings sometimes call the Northern Lights. What makes the observation particularly surprising is that the brown dwarf doesn’t have a nearby star that could cause such an aurora. Aurorae on Earth happens when particles from the…
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Mercury Probe Flies Through Charged Particle Rain That Triggers the Planet’s Auroras
On October 1, 2021, a pair of small spacecraft got their first good look at the closest planet to the Sun, revealing the strange process through which Mercury produces its own auroras. BepiColombo, a joint mission by the European Space Agency (ESA) and Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), launched in October 2018 and is still…
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New Zealand’s Wicked Spaceplane Approved for Suborbital Test Flights
Dawn Aerospace CEO Stefan Powell announced today that the company’s Mk-II Aurora spaceplane has received approval from the Civil Aviation Authority of New Zealand for rocket-powered flight. The company is now ready to test the vehicle’s rocket engines with flights beginning next month.
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25 Spellbinding Photos of the Northern Lights
The Northern Lights (aurora borealis) are caused by energised particles from the Sun that collide with gases in Earth’s atmosphere. The collisions cause the dazzling light displays known as aurorae; in the southern hemisphere, they’re aurora australis.