A driving force behind cosmic expansion
Scientists have captured the Sun’s surface at unprecedented resolution with the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope and other instruments and have identified widespread Kelvin–Helmholtz vortices—500–2,000km spirals of magnetised plasma. The team has linked these instabilities to how magnetic energy cascades to smaller scales and feeds flares and coronal mass ejections that produce space weather.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has launched from Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy and has separated cleanly. The observatory is travelling toward Lagrange point 2, about one million miles from Earth, for a five‑year primary mission to map billions of galaxies, search for exoplanets and study dark matter and dark energy.
Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute have published results showing collisions of oxygen-16 and neon-20 nuclei have produced quark–gluon plasma droplets. The experiments have revealed that particle emission patterns reflect the original nuclear shapes, offering a new probe of nuclear structure and the conditions that existed microseconds after the Big Bang.