As black holes feed, they pull material into a disk around them. The material orbiting in this disk gets heated to extreme temperatures, and so it becomes a plasma — a state of matter in which some of ...

Magnetic fields are a fundamental part of the universe. They govern how small particles – the building blocks of planets, ...

Numerical simulations provide a mechanism that explains how celestial objects such as stars and galaxies can generate ordered, macroscopic magnetic fields. The mechanism arises from turbulence — ...

Magnetic fields play an important—if sometimes underappreciated—part in planetary systems. Without a strong magnetic field, planets can end up as a barren wasteland like Mars, or they could indirectly ...

Scientists have long known that migrating birds and homing pigeons navigate in part by sensing the Earth’s magnetic fields, especially at night or in overcast conditions when visual landmarks or ...

It's well established that the universe is expanding, but there's serious disagreement among scientists over how fast it's happening. Two of our best ways of measuring the cosmic expansion rate, the ...

In the late 1800s, the French naturalist Camille Viguier proposed an idea that would be dismissed and forgotten for more than a century. He speculated that birds and other animals could navigate with ...

Pigeons and other birds can do it. So can sea turtles and spiny lobsters, moths and mole rats, gray whales and big brown bats ...

Scientists have uncovered a surprising force that may help explain how binary star systems form so quickly. New supercomputer ...

Quantum technology often gets pitched as a faster kind of computing. This research points in a different direction first: control. By changing a magnetic field on a schedule, rather than leaving it ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. An award-winning reporter writing about stargazing and the night sky. Using 11 years of magnetic field measurements from the ...