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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Our planet’s magnetosphere has seen dramatic shifts across its history—even total reversals—but this recent wrinkle doesn’t pose a threat to life Earth’s magnetic field surrounds the planet, with ...

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 ...

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 ...

In physics, we have a bunch of constants that are used in models to explain how the world works. These are fixed numbers that we plug into equations along with our variables. For example, the ...