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 ...

As cosmic strings — exotic wrinkles in space-time left over from the earliest moments of the Big Bang — travel, they may trigger the formation of magnetic fields in their wakes, new research suggests.

Primordial magnetic fields, billions of times weaker than a fridge magnet, may have left lasting imprints on the Universe. Researchers ran over 250,000 simulations to show how these fields shaped the ...

A team of physicists and engineers at the University of Colorado Boulder has discovered a new way to measure the orientation of magnetic fields using what may be the tiniest compasses around—atoms.

The universe's first magnetic fields may have been much weaker than we first imagined — and were roughly equivalent to the strength of the magnetic activity within the human brain, according to a new ...

How the universe got its large magnetic fields has remained one of the stickiest outstanding problems in astrophysics. Now, researchers have proposed a novel solution: a giant "dust battery" operating ...