plasma

November 29, 20233min readA solar outburst shoots charged particles into space—and toward EarthBy Meghan BartelsA filament erupted from the sun on Nov. 27, 2023, and left a “canyon of fire” visible in the bottom right of this view. A long filament of roiling plasma arcing over the sun’s surface snapped this week, leaving behind a scalding scar that has been dubbed a “canyon of fire.” It also spat a burst of solar plasma into space. There’s a chance this solar outburst and several that followed it could trigger minor…

Giant waves have been found swirling in the plasma at the boundary of Jupiter's magnetosphere, scientists have found.Data from Juno suggests the Jupiter probe regularly dips through these waves, invisible to the naked eye, as it orbits the giant planet. The discovery helps astronomers understand how mass and energy is transferred from the solar wind to the Jovian planetary environment.Actually, such waves are not unknown in the Solar System. They're known as Kelvin-Helmhotz waves, and they occur when there's a difference…

The sun is producing fireworks—letting off a trio of solar flares in just two hours amid a period of high activity that may cause mild consequences on Earth. Late July 17 and early July 18, the sun let off three of what scientists call M-class flares. (Solar flares are bursts of radiation from the sun and are categorized by their strength. X-class are the most powerful, followed by M-class; C, B and A-class flares are each progressively 10 times weaker.) According to SpaceWeather.com, the third and most powerful flare’s…

By U.S. Department of Energy July 2, 2023A conjectured phase diagram of nuclear matter. New data – that show high collision energies produce a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) while the lowest energy collisions do not – will help scientists map out the boundaries between QGP and the hadronic phase. Credit: Brookhaven National LaboratoryThrough gold nuclei collisions at varying energies, physicists have found that the creation of quark-gluon <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt"…

A slightly tweaked KDE Plasma desktop on Kubuntu. Screenshot by Jack Wallen/ZDNETFor years, I've not given KDE Plasma its due. That is partially because my default desktops have generally been GNOME or GNOME-adjacent. Another reason is that I'm not a fan of the "standard" desktop. When I see a desktop that includes a traditional panel, desktop menu, clickable icons, and a system tray, my general reaction is that it reminds me too much of the Windows interface. Given I left Windows back in 1997 in favor of a more…

The intense heat under the Earth's surface represents a virtually inexhaustible source of reliable clean energy that would be available 24/7 from anywhere on Earth – you could pull it up as steam to run generator turbines, or pipe it directly into district heating systems.That's if we could get to it. Earth's most easily accessible geothermal energy is located wherever it's closest to the surface – typically, geologically unstable areas near volcanos and lots of seismic activity, representing only about 3% of the Earth's…

The Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha‘apai volcano in the area of the Tonga Islands in the South Pacific Ocean blew its top in a massive eruption in January 2022. In addition to an enormous plume of gas and debris, the eruption triggered pressure waves that rippled through the entire planet’s atmosphere, set off a sonic boom heard as far away as Alaska and unleashed a tsunami that swept over nearby islands. The dramatic event was particularly intriguing to scientists focused on elusive atmospheric phenomena; a host of satellites…

With technology increasingly embedded in our everyday lives, it is becoming more important to understand space weather and its impacts on tech.When one hears "space weather", one typically thinks of huge explosions on the Sun – coronal mass ejections hurled towards Earth, creating beautiful displays of aurora.However, not all space weather starts at the Sun.The volcanic eruption in Tonga in January 2022 was so large, it created waves in the upper atmosphere that constituted their own form of space weather.It was one of…

Jack Wallen/ZDNETKubuntu FocusZDNET RECOMMENDS Kubuntu Focus Ir14 This clean, black chassis device feels and behaves like a premium laptop, where everything not only "just works", it works really well. According to my contact at Kubuntu Focus, the laptop "...is stock Kubuntu 22.04 LTS with Focus hardware integration, optimizations, and tools delivered on top. We felt building a separate distribution and ecosystem is the last thing anyone needed, and instead focused on working and supporting Kubuntu, Ubuntu, and KDE…

A dynamic moment of a turbulent wall of plasma falling down the Sun's…