New efforts to forecast space weather with greater accuracy and reliability are being led by Aberystwyth University academics. 

In one of the biggest surprises of NASA's University of Arizona-led OSIRIS-REx mission, its target asteroid, Bennu, turned out to be a jagged, rugged world covered in large boulders.

Researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) analyzed nearly three decades of solar oscillation data to trace the Sun’s interior dynamics, and have now pointed to the likely location of the star’s magnetic engine deep beneath its surface — roughly 200,000 kilometers down, about the length of stacking 16 Earths end to end.

How does fine dust aggregate into building blocks that ultimately form entire planets like our Earth? A research team led by the University of Bern, with the participation of ETH Zurich, the University of Zurich and the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) PlanetS has provided the first experimental evidence – obtained during parabolic flights in zero gravity – that a key physical process, known as shear-flow instability, actually occurs under conditions similar to those in planet formation regions. The study thus addresses an important gap in our understanding of the very first steps of planet formation.

Kyoto, Japan -- The stability of the iron atom's nucleus has made it one of the most abundant heavy elements in the universe. When excited, iron atoms emit distinctive fluorescent X-ray lines which can be identified using the Fe Kα emission line, an approximately 6.4 keV fluorescent line produced when an electron transitions from the 2p orbital to the 1s orbital of the atom.

The Fe Kα emission line is widely used as a diagnostic tool for understanding the physical conditions of matter across a variety of astronomical objects. The energy of an emission line depends on the ionization state of iron: the degree to which its electrons have been stripped away. As ionization progresses and electrons are removed, the effective electric attraction between each remaining electron and the atomic nucleus becomes stronger.

From this, one might expect the energy of the Fe Kα emission line to increase as ionization increases. However, theoretical studies have demonstrated that, for iron, there exists a limited range of low ionized states in which the energy of the Fe Kα line sees a slight decrease instead of an increase. This happens because during the removal of electrons from the 3d orbital, the repulsion between electrons within the 3d shell is reduced, and the 3d orbital contracts toward the nucleus. While the Fe Kα emission line corresponds to the 2p → 1s transition, the Fe Kβ line corresponds to the 3p → 1s transition, and this line increases almost uniformly with increasing ionization.

A new study reports that a biochar-enhanced photocatalyst can efficiently degrade antibiotic contaminants in water, offering a promising strategy for addressing one of the growing threats to global water quality.