The magnetosphere, formed by Earth's magnetic field, acts as a protective shield that deflects solar wind—the flow of charged particles constantly streaming from the sun toward our planet. This ...

A new study led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) links quasi-periodic pulsations (QPPs) in solar flares to dynamic ...

In magnetic reconnection, adjacent magnetic field lines break and snap together to form new lines. This process converts magnetic energy to both thermal energy, or heat, and kinetic energy, or the ...

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 ...

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has directly observed magnetic reconnection in the Sun’s atmosphere for the first time, confirming decades-old theories about solar explosions. This discovery bridges ...

NASA's Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites (TRACERS) mission, a collaborative effort led by the University of Iowa (UI) with substantial contributions from Southwest ...

An SwRI-led study identified particles accelerated to extremely high energies by magnetic reconnection near the Sun. As NASA’s Parker Solar Probe (trajectory shown in green) crossed the heliospheric ...

A new theory describes how particle interactions fuel fast magnetic reconnection, the process behind solar flares and other astrophysical jets. During fleeting fits, the sun occasionally hurls a ...