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Radiation Belts

20 May 2023
Astronomy, Biology, Electromagnetism

William sent in the link https://www.yahoo.com/news/radiation-belt-seen-beyond-solar-114246887.html … a radiation belt, outside the solar system, has been spotted, high energy particles trapped by a magnetic field. The radiation belt is  double lobed – just like the one that  encircles Jupiter.

The radiation is in the form of persistent intense radio emissions, revealing the  presence of a cloud of high energy electrons trapped in the magnetic field. In other words, radio emitting plasma = electrified gas.

At https://phys.org/news/2023-05-images-reveal-magnetic-fields-horsehead.html … a major telescope array on Hawaii has prduced new interesting images of the Horsehead Nebula, in polarized light. It revealed the nebula’s magnetic fields. They have delineated two dense regions hidden in the Horses head. It seems to be a ridge of warm gas and dust that forms the head and mane of the horse, and this is interacting with ultra violet photons from nearby stars.

At https://phys.org/news/2023-05-fast-universe-multiple-views-star.html … how fast is the universe really expanding? Multiple views  of an exploding star raise new questions. Two new papers have used a new technique to measure the Hubble constant – using light from an exploding star. The idea the universe is expanding has been around since the 1920s, and is a common quoted consensus point of view. The Hubble tension is the ten per cent difference in the speed of  that expansion. One theory uses microwave background and the other, uses supernovae or cephid stars, measuring the light. The new technique is a variation on the  second method but the results are nearer to the first method than the second. Perplexing. The question remains unresolved,

At https://phys.org/news/2023-05-flip-flopping-magnetic-fields-hint-solution.html … fast radio bursts are a puzzle – intense, but very short in duration. Flashes of radio energy from space. They go on to speculate what might cause it, from a highly changeable magnetic field to a cosmic explosion in a binary system, and the option of a black hole lurking in the background. They have discovered the electro-magnetic waves are strong in one direction – and highly polarized. The region near the object seems to be highly magnetised. The strength of the magentic field alone seems to vary over the months – even flipping direction twice.

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