Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Heard as a Sound Is an Unnerving Horror - ScienceAlert

It would be fair to say that design teams at SpaceX threw a lot of the rulebook out the window when they designed Starship, which is the most powerful rocket ever built. SpaceX's flagship rocket, which is still under developmental testing, was designed for missions that had never been attempted before. Starship is expected to carry payloads and crew to Mars at scale, and this required out-of-the-box thinking. It is for this reason that the Starship vehicle and Super Heavy booster had to be designed using a different approach. One of the most novel parts of any Starship flight is the landing, where the Starship vehicle glides on its belly through the upper parts of the atmosphere after reentry, then flips into an upright position for landing at the last possible moment. This is done to gradually slow it down, to manage reentry temperatures effectively, and to use a flip maneuver to get Starship into an upright position so it can land on the surface of Mars, or to be caught by SpaceX's Mechazilla launch tower arms back on Earth. SpaceX designed this flight profile (and designed Starship around the concept) for a good reason, which was to shed speed passively during reentry and to

IntroductionSurface acoustic wave (SAW) sensors have emerged as versatile platforms for a wide range of sensing applications1,2, including magnetic field detection and electrical current measurement3,4,5,6,7. These devices operate by generating surface acoustic waves on a piezoelectric substrate using interdigital transducers (IDTs)8. The propagating acoustic waves induce periodic strain in an overlying magnetostrictive film. An external magnetic field alters the elastic properties of this film, such as its Young’s and shear modulus, through the \(\:{\Delta\:}E\)-effect and \(\:{\Delta\:}G\)-effect, respectively9. The magnetoelastic SAW interaction with these field-dependent elastic constants modulates the SAW propagation velocity in a delay line setup3,6,7,10 or frequency in a resonator setup11,12. Recent studies have demonstrated limits of detection (LOD), such as 22 pT/Hz1/213, 55 pT/Hz1/214 or 126 pT/Hz1/215 all at 10 Hz for various SAW sensor setups, highlighting the strong potential of this technology for low-frequency magnetic field sensing.

A new method for identifying magnetic activity on the far side of the Sun rejects about 90% of false helioseismic detections before they enter solar magnetic-field simulations. Tests found that conventional near-side-driven simulations underestimated the Sun’s total unsigned magnetic flux by roughly 10–20%, showing how much magnetic activity can be missing while active regions develop beyond direct Earth view. Scientists have long been able to reconstruct magnetic maps of the full Sun, but the hidden hemisphere remains a fundamental weakness. Surface flux transport models evolve magnetic fields measured on the Earth-facing side as the Sun rotates, yet they cannot directly capture an active region that emerges or continues growing out of view. The resulting maps provide boundary conditions for models of the corona and heliosphere, so missing far-side magnetic flux can propagate into calculations of the solar environment. Bibhuti Kumar Jha and colleagues developed a probabilistic system for deciding which far-side helioseismic detections are credible enough to add to an Advective Flux Transport (AFT) simulation. Helioseismology does not photograph the magnetic field itself.

Research conducted by a group led by scientists from Cambridge University and the Max Planck Institute has found the oldest evidence for the possible use of a magnetic compass by an organism.1 The evidence exists in so-called magnetofossils found in marine sediments that have been dated to 97 million years old. The material in the fossils is magnetite, which is one of the theorized mechanisms for animal magnetoreception. Magnetite (Fe3O4) is an iron oxide usually found as single domain crystals approximately 20-50 nanometers in diameter, making it challenging to detect in organisms. The crystals are permanent magnets that align with Earth’s magnetic field. Several animal species have been found to form biogenic magnetite, including magnetotactic bacteria and some species of fish, including salmon and trout.2 There is also some evidence that a number of genes associated with the formation of magnetite in organisms (biomineralization) are shared by bacteria and eukaryotic (multicellular) animals.3 Bacteria use the compass to guide their movement in finding favorable conditions.

The Moon no longer generates a global magnetic field, but traces of its ancient magnetism remain locked inside lunar rocks and soil. By studying the magnetic minerals preserved in these materials, scientists can reconstruct how the Moon's magnetic environment changed over time. Researchers analyzing metallic iron inside impact glass from Chang'e-6 lunar soil have now identified face-centered cubic γ-Fe for the first time in natural lunar samples.