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 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 ...

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 — ...

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 ...

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

For nearly 20 years, physicists and engineers have chased the idea of invisibility. Early efforts focused on hiding objects from light using so-called metamaterials with extreme and often unrealistic ...

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 ...