Wind Stories
Multiple Spacecraft Tell the Story of One Giant Solar Storm
April 17, 2021, was a day like any other day on the Sun, until a brilliant flash erupted and an enormous cloud of solar material billowed away from our star. Such outbursts from the Sun are not unusual, but this…
NASA’s Swift, Fermi Missions Detect Exceptional Cosmic Blast
Astronomers around the world are captivated by an unusually bright and long-lasting pulse of high-energy radiation that swept over Earth Sunday, Oct. 9. The emission came from a gamma-ray burst (GRB) – the most powerful class of explosions in the…
In First, Scientists Trace Fastest Solar Particles to Their Roots on the Sun
Zipping through space at close to the speed of light, Solar Energetic Particles, or SEPs, are one of the main challenges for the future of human spaceflight. Clouds of these tiny solar projectiles can make it to Earth – a…
NASA Missions Unmask Magnetar Eruptions in Nearby Galaxies
On April 15, 2020, a brief burst of high-energy light swept through the solar system, triggering instruments on several NASA and European spacecraft. Now, multiple international science teams conclude that the blast came from a supermagnetized stellar remnant known as…
NASA Missions Help Pinpoint the Source of a Unique X-ray, Radio Burst
On April 28, a supermagnetized stellar remnant known as a magnetar blasted out a simultaneous mix of X-ray and radio signals never observed before. The flare-up included the first fast radio burst (FRB) ever seen from within our Milky Way…
Spots, Waves and Wind: A Solar Science Timeline | Full Text
View an interactive version of this timeline. Humankind has studied the Sun for millennia. Ancient Babylonians recorded eclipses on stone tablets. Renaissance scientists peered through telescopes, tracking sunspots. Eventually we took to space, and the first satellites captured solar particles streaming past Earth.…
25 Years of Science in the Solar Wind
In the early 1980s, heliophysicists needed answers. They wanted to learn how to protect astronauts and assets around Earth from the potentially damaging space weather that results from our tumultuous Sun. To do that, they needed to better understand the…
A Solar Wind Workhorse Marks 20 Years of Science Discoveries
The end of 2014 marks two decades of data from a NASA mission called Wind. Wind — along with 17 other missions – is part of what’s called the Heliophysics Systems Observatory, a fleet of spacecraft dedicated to understanding how…
Out of An Hours-long Explosion, A Stand-In For The First Stars
Astronomers analyzing a long-lasting blast of high-energy light observed in 2013 report finding features strikingly similar to those expected from an explosion from the universe’s earliest stars. If this interpretation is correct, the outburst validates ideas about a recently identified…