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 ...

Geophysicists have modeled how Earth’s magnetic field could form even when its core was fully liquid. By removing the effects of viscosity in their simulation, they revealed a self-sustaining dynamo ...

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 ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. David Bressan is a geologist who covers curiosities about Earth. Nov 28, 2025, 07:59am EST Map of the strength of the Earth's ...

While we have sent probes billions of kilometres into interstellar space, humans have barely scratched the surface of our own planet, not even making it through the thin crust. Roughly 3,000km beneath ...

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 — ...

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 ...

The universe is soaked in weak-but-persistent magnetic fields. Despite decades of research, astronomers still aren't exactly sure where these magnetic fields came from. But new research suggests they ...

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Scientists studying Earth's magnetic field have discovered that its electric heartbeat flows in the opposite direction from what long-standing models predict. Earth is surrounded by a vast magnetic ...

Scientists have shown that changing magnetic fields in precise ways can create exotic quantum matter that does not normally ...