29 May 2024Solar Cycle 25 is ramping up towards peak solar activity. On April 23-24, 2023, Earth experienced its first severe geomagnetic storm in eight years, marked by the Dst index reaching -213 nT and the Kp index exceeding 8, and creating auroras as far south as Texas, USA. The CME was tracked by numerous spacecraft and instruments, providing a rich...

28 May 2024ESA’s Solar Orbiter made the first ever connection between measurements of the solar wind around a spacecraft to high-resolution images of the Sun’s surface at a close distance. The success opens a new way for solar physicists to study the source regions of the solar wind.

22 May 2024Space weather has the potential to significantly disrupt human technology both in space and on the ground, including loss of satellites, damage to power grids and communication blackouts. Fortunately, many of these effects can be mitigated with preventative measures should the arrival time and severity of the storm be known in advance. Since the...

15 May 2024In this research, we leverage new observations obtained by the Spectrometer/Telescope for Imaging X-rays (STIX) onboard Solar Orbiter combined with microwave observations from the ground-based Expanded Owens Valley Solar Array (EOVSA) to study the spatial evolution of QPPs in time and energy.

4 April 2024On 8 April 2024, a great swath of the United States and Mexico will experience a total solar eclipse, with viewers getting the rare chance to see the Sun’s stunning outer atmosphere.

2 April 2024The ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter is approaching the closest point to the Sun in its current orbit. It is an important time for the mission’s science activities, and the mission control team at ESA is constantly preparing for any possible problems the spacecraft might face as it swoops past our active and unpredictable star.

28 March 2024In the run up to April’s total solar eclipse, ESA-led Solar Orbiter and NASA-led Parker Solar Probe are both at their closest approach to the Sun. Tomorrow, they are taking the opportunity to join hands in studying the driving rain of plasma that streams from the Sun, fills the Solar System, and causes dazzlement and destruction at Earth.

1 February 2024Interplanetary (IP) shock waves, often triggered by solar phenomena like coronal mass ejections (CMEs), are efficient accelerators of ions and, in rare instances, electrons. Our study presents the first-ever observations of field-aligned beams (FABs) of electrons reaching relativistic energies ahead of an IP shock. These measurements were made...

18 January 2024The solar wind is observed to be turbulent. Turbulence in plasmas involves a complex cross-scale coupling of fields, thus how the energy contained in the large-scale fluctuations of electromagnetic and velocity fields cascades all the way down to the kinetic scales, and how such turbulence interacts with particles, remain unsolved problems in...

11 January 2024Energetic Storm Particle (ESP) events are a type of solar energetic particle (SEP) events characterized by the rapid increase in the SEP intensity associated with a shock driven by a coronal mass ejection (CME). Two ESP events, both emanating from the same active region, were observed by the Solar Orbiter on August 31, 2022, and September 5,...