Now an international research team has reported a discovery that adds an unexpected twist to this puzzle. Researchers from the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the Technische Universität Braunschweig and the University of Tokyo, working in cooperation with Tohoku University, Kyushu University, Osaka University, and research institutes across a total of ten countries, have demonstrated for the first time a reversal phenomenon in the rotation of magnetic fields within space turbulence. Using high-precision magnetic field and particle measurements from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission, the team showed directly that the turbulent magnetic fields of the solar wind exhibit a clear reversal in their sense of rotation across a certain wavelength. Remarkably, the reversal grows more pronounced and shifts toward longer wavelengths as the solar wind travels radially outward from the Sun. The findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The significance of the result lies in what the reversal reveals about the hidden architecture of turbulence. On large length scales, space plasma behaves much like a fluid, and turbulence develops through the excitation of vortices and electromagnetic waves. The fluctuations become random and chaotic, which is precisely what scientists mean when they describe a flow as turbulent. Yet the new analysis shows that within this apparent randomness, the rotation of the magnetic fields is anything but random. When viewed on large scales, looking radially away from the Sun, the fields preferentially rotate counterclockwise. On smaller length scales, however, the picture inverts: the fields rotate clockwise. The scale at which this switch occurs happens to coincide with the transition from large-scale, fluid-like dynamics to small-scale, particle-like dynamics in the plasma.

This transition scale is a critical boundary in plasma physics. Above it, the magnetohydrodynamic description applies, treating the plasma as a conducting fluid whose motions and magnetic fields evolve together. Below it, the individual character of the particles matters, and a kinetic description becomes necessary, one that tracks how ions and electrons each respond to the fields around them. The discovery that the magnetic rotation sense flips exactly at this interface suggests that the two regimes are not simply stacked on top of one another but are dynamically linked in a way that leaves a measurable imprint on the turbulence. Energy and handedness, it appears, are exchanged across this boundary in a structured, nonlocal fashion rather than being handed down smoothly through a cascade of ever-smaller eddies.

“We see a clear structure in the spectrum, even though the turbulence represents unstructured motions,” said Dr. Masatomi Iizawa of TU Braunschweig, the first author of the article. The observation is striking precisely because turbulence is supposed to scramble order, not create it. A coherent feature in the spectrum of a turbulent medium challenges the intuitive picture of chaos and points instead to an organizing principle rooted in the fundamental physics of magnetized, collisionless plasma. The quantity at the heart of the finding, the handedness or helicity of the magnetic fluctuations, acts as a kind of fingerprint of how field lines twist and rotate, and its behavior across scales encodes how the turbulence redistributes energy between the fluid-like and particle-like regimes.

Dr. Yokoi of the University of Tokyo emphasized the broader implications of the work. “The results are of great significance for both plasma physics and astrophysics,” he said. That assessment reflects the sheer ubiquity of plasma turbulence in the cosmos. It shapes the dynamics of the solar wind, the stream of charged particles that flows continuously from the Sun and fills interplanetary space. It governs processes in the Earth’s magnetosphere, the magnetic bubble that shields our planet from that wind. It operates during solar eruptions, in the shock waves and magnetic clouds those eruptions send hurtling outward, and in the accretion disks that feed growing black holes and young stars throughout the universe.

The practical stakes extend all the way to Earth’s surface. Turbulence in the solar wind influences the shock waves and magnetic clouds produced by solar eruptions, and it is a very important factor in predicting geomagnetic storms, the disturbances that can disturb satellite operations, communications, navigation systems, and power grids when violent space weather strikes the magnetosphere. A deeper understanding of how turbulent fluctuations are organized across scales, and how energy moves between large fluid-like structures and small particle-scale dynamics, therefore feeds directly into the science of space weather forecasting. Every refinement of the theoretical picture of solar wind turbulence is a step toward better anticipation of the conditions that space-based infrastructure and terrestrial technology will face.

The measurement itself was made possible by the extraordinary capabilities of NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, a mission designed to fly closer to the Sun than any spacecraft before it and to sample the solar wind in its native environment. The probe’s high-precision magnetometers and particle instruments allow researchers to resolve the fine structure of the turbulent fluctuations in situ, something that remote sensing can never achieve. By analyzing the magnetic field data at multiple distances from the Sun, the team could track not only the reversal of the rotation sense at a given location but also its evolution along the wind’s outward path, watching the feature grow and migrate toward longer wavelengths as the plasma expands into interplanetary space.

That radial evolution is one of the most intriguing aspects of the discovery. It indicates that the interface between the magnetohydrodynamic and kinetic regimes is not a static boundary fixed by local plasma conditions alone, but a dynamic feature that the turbulence itself reshapes as the solar wind ages. The finding, described in the published article as the nonlocal evolution of magnetic helicity across the magnetohydrodynamic–kinetic interface, suggests that processes occurring at one scale can be driven by dynamics at quite different scales, a hallmark of nonlocality that complicates the classical picture of a tidy, local energy cascade. For theorists, this provides a demanding new benchmark: any complete theory of collisionless plasma turbulence must now reproduce not only the spectra of the fluctuations but also the organized handedness that threads through them.

For decades, turbulence in space plasma has been studied as the paradigmatic example of chaos in a magnetized medium, a natural laboratory where the cascade of energy can be followed from the vast scales of the heliosphere down to the tiny scales where ions and electrons exchange energy with the fields. The new result adds a compelling chapter to that story. Within the unstructured motions of the solar wind, a structure has been found, born at the very boundary where fluid-like behavior gives way to particle-like behavior, and it evolves in a predictable way as the wind streams away from the Sun. As Parker Solar Probe continues its mission and as theorists grapple with the implications, the reversal phenomenon is poised to reshape how scientists understand the flow of energy through magnetized plasma, from the corona of our own star to the accretion disks of distant galaxies.

Subject of Research: Magnetic helicity reversal and turbulence in the solar wind observed by the Parker Solar Probe

Article Title: Structure in the unstructured: New phenomenon discovered in the solar wind

Article References: Structure in the unstructured: New phenomenon discovered in the solar wind. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: solar wind, plasma turbulence, Parker Solar Probe, magnetic helicity, magnetohydrodynamics, kinetic physics, space weather, geomagnetic storms, collisionless plasma, The Astrophysical Journal Letters, magnetic fields, heliophysics

The foundational giant impact models, including a landmark 2001 study by Dr. Robin Canup of SwRI and Dr. Erik Asphaug of the University of Arizona, treated the colliding planets essentially as fluids. At the enormous energies involved in a planetary-scale collision, researchers had long assumed that the intrinsic strength of rock, its resistance to deformation and fracture, would be negligible compared with the crushing pressures and temperatures generated during impact. That assumption simplified the calculations and produced the now-canonical picture: Theia strikes the young Earth, is largely destroyed, and sheds a massive disk of molten and vaporized debris into orbit around the planet. Over time, material in that protolunar disk coalesces, and the Moon assembles from the wreckage. It is a compelling narrative, and one that has shaped textbooks, museum displays, and countless scientific papers.

Dr. Adeene Denton, formerly a NASA Postdoctoral Program fellow at SwRI and now a postdoctoral researcher in the institute’s Solar System Science and Exploration Division, led the new effort to test whether that simplification could be justified. Modern computational methods, she noted, have already demonstrated that material strength matters enormously in collisions between smaller bodies such as asteroids, and in her previous work modeling the formation of the Pluto-Charon system. The open question was whether strength would matter at the vastly larger scale of the Moon-forming impact. The answer, according to the new simulations, is an emphatic yes. When the Earth and Theia are modeled as geologically realistic bodies with temperature-dependent strength, the way the Moon emerges from the collision changes in fundamental ways.

The key physical insight is deceptively simple: hotter bodies are weaker than colder ones. Rock that is close to its melting point deforms readily under stress, behaving more like a fluid, while cooler rock retains genuine strength and can resist fragmentation and flow. Because protoplanets begin their lives hot, heated by accretion, radioactive decay, and the energy of formation, and then cool gradually over tens of millions of years, the internal temperature of the Earth and Theia at the moment of impact serves as a kind of geological clock. The team’s simulations show that Moon formation is acutely sensitive to those temperatures, and that the thermal state of the colliding bodies effectively encodes information about when in solar system history the collision took place.

The consequences are striking. In some scenarios, corresponding to hotter, earlier, and therefore weaker colliding planets, the impact destroys Theia and generates the familiar massive debris disk around Earth, from which the Moon gradually accretes. But when Denton and her colleagues ran a simulation using the same parameters as the original impact modeling, including matching the temperature structures inside both bodies, an intact Moon emerged within roughly five hours of the collision. Rather than being shredded and reassembled from disk material over years or centuries, the Moon in this colder, later scenario survives the impact as a coherent body, captured into orbit essentially whole. Intact Moon outcomes had been glimpsed in earlier simulations, but this work is the first to demonstrate that material strength and temperature play a central role in determining whether the Moon forms intact or is assembled from processed disk material.

The implications extend well beyond the mechanics of the collision itself. If the Moon formed intact, its initial composition, thermal state, and internal structure could differ substantially from those of a Moon assembled from a hot, well-mixed debris disk. Dr. Robin Canup, vice president of SwRI’s Solar System Science and Exploration Division in Boulder, Colorado, who was not involved in the study but co-authored the foundational 2001 work, described the results as surprising and exciting, noting that they imply a potential connection between the physical properties of the Moon today, including perhaps its volatile content, and the thermal state of the Earth and Theia at the time of the giant impact. In other words, the water, carbon, and other volatile elements that scientists measure in lunar samples today may carry a chemical memory of how hot the colliding worlds were billions of years ago.

That connection, if it can be pinned down, offers planetary scientists a genuinely new tool. The Moon’s volatile inventory is one of the most intensively studied aspects of lunar science, informed by the Apollo samples and by ongoing analysis of data from modern lunar missions. If the abundance and distribution of those volatiles can be linked to a specific thermal scenario for the giant impact, researchers may be able to constrain the timing of the Moon-forming event itself, one of the most consequential dates in the history of the solar system. A colder Earth and Theia would point to a later collision, after the planets had had time to radiate away their primordial heat, while a hotter, more fluid outcome would suggest an earlier, more violent epoch.

One long-standing puzzle remains stubbornly unresolved, however: the remarkably close compositional similarity between the Earth and the Moon. Isotopic measurements of elements such as oxygen, titanium, and silicon show that the Earth and its satellite are nearly identical in makeup, far more alike than two randomly assembled planetary bodies should be, particularly if the Moon is largely built from the remains of Theia. Mars, by contrast, is compositionally distinct from both. One possible explanation, which the new study does not overturn, is that Theia and the proto-Earth formed from a common region of the protoplanetary disk, sharing the same raw materials, while Mars formed farther out in the solar system under different conditions. Denton offered an evocative analogy: because Earth and Mars formed in the same neighborhood of the solar system, they are like siblings, whereas the Moon and Earth are more like fraternal twins, born of the same event but assembled from different parents.

The technical achievement underlying these results lies in the simulation methods themselves. The study employed giant impact modeling techniques developed at the University of Bern and the University of Arizona, extended to incorporate temperature-dependent geologic strength for the first time in the Moon-formation context. This means the code tracks not only the hydrodynamic flow of molten and vaporized material during the collision but also the ability of cooler rock to resist deformation, fracture, and shear. That additional physics changes how energy is dissipated, how the impacting body breaks apart or holds together, and how much material ends up in orbit versus falling back onto the planets. The difference between a disk-forming outcome and an intact-capture outcome, the simulations show, can hinge entirely on whether the colliding interiors are modeled as strengthless fluids or as real, thermally evolving geology.

What emerges from this work is a richer and more contingent picture of the Moon’s birth. Rather than a single canonical scenario, there is now a family of plausible pathways, each tied to the thermal histories of the two colliding worlds and each leaving a potentially distinct fingerprint on the Moon we see today. The intact-Moon scenario, in particular, invites a re-examination of assumptions baked into decades of lunar science, from models of the early lunar magma ocean to interpretations of the Moon’s internal structure. As researchers begin to compare the predictions of strength-inclusive simulations against the growing body of lunar geochemical and geophysical data, the giant impact hypothesis is entering a new phase, one in which the preexisting geology of the colliding planets, long considered an afterthought, may hold the key to understanding both when the Moon formed and what it is made of.

Subject of Research: Computational modeling of the Moon-forming giant impact incorporating material strength and temperature

Article Title: SwRI-led modeling identifies new scenarios for Moon formation

Article References: SwRI-led modeling identifies new scenarios for Moon formation. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Moon formation, giant impact, Theia, Southwest Research Institute, material strength, protolunar disk, planetary science, The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Earth-Moon system, lunar volatiles, computer simulations, protoplanets

White dwarfs are the dense, Earth-sized remnants left behind when stars like the Sun exhaust their nuclear fuel and shed their outer layers. In an ordinary, non-rotating and non-magnetised white dwarf, the star is held up by electron degeneracy pressure, a quantum-mechanical effect that resists compression independently of temperature. Chandrasekhar showed in the 1930s that this support has a finite capacity: as the star’s mass approaches about 1.4 solar masses, the electrons are pushed to ever higher speeds approaching the speed of light, and the pressure they provide can no longer keep pace with gravity. For a carbon-oxygen white dwarf, crossing this threshold means the core becomes dense enough to ignite carbon fusion, potentially triggering a runaway thermonuclear explosion observed as a Type Ia supernova.

The constancy of that threshold is what makes Type Ia supernovae so valuable to cosmologists. If every such explosion arises from a star near the same limiting mass, the total energy released and the peak luminosity should be essentially fixed from event to event. Astronomers have exploited this uniformity to calibrate cosmic distances, and it was precisely this technique that revealed the accelerating expansion of the universe. Any population of white dwarfs that can exceed the classical limit therefore has consequences that ripple outward from stellar evolution all the way to measurements of the cosmos itself.

The new work began, somewhat unexpectedly, as an informal challenge. “The idea started in 2011, when a summer student came to me and I gave him a problem quite casually: to check whether the Chandrasekhar limit can be violated by a magnetic field,” explains Banibrata Mukhopadhyay, Professor at the Department of Physics at IISc and corresponding author of the study. What began as a back-of-the-envelope exercise has matured, over more than a decade, into a full evolutionary treatment of magnetised stars, carried out with first author Zenia Zuraiq, a PhD student in the same department, and collaborators.

Theorists had already speculated for decades that super-Chandrasekhar white dwarfs might exist. Observations of unusually over-luminous Type Ia supernovae have lent circumstantial support to the idea, hinting at progenitor stars whose masses, and whose effective mass limit, could be as high as 2.8 times the mass of the Sun. What remained uncertain was whether such objects could actually form through ordinary stellar evolution, rather than existing merely as theoretical curiosities. “The important question was not simply whether a super-Chandrasekhar white dwarf is possible, but whether a star can actually evolve into one,” says Zuraiq. “Our simulations allowed us to follow that evolutionary pathway from the main-sequence star to the white dwarf, and show that under certain conditions, such a pathway is possible.”

To answer that question, the team turned to STARS, a stellar evolution code originally developed at the University of Cambridge to model how stars change over their lifetimes. The researchers modified the code in two crucial ways: they incorporated the physics of magnetic fields and they added a treatment of white dwarf cooling. This allowed them to track magnetised stars continuously from the main sequence, the long-lived phase in which stars generate energy by fusing hydrogen in their cores, through their later evolution into compact white dwarfs. They then placed the resulting white dwarf in a binary system, where it could accrete additional matter from a companion star, the standard route by which white dwarfs are thought to build up mass toward explosion.

The simulations revealed a self-reinforcing mechanism that grows more powerful as the star gains weight. A magnetic field that is initially too weak to matter becomes increasingly significant as the white dwarf accumulates mass. Because accretion makes the star denser and causes it to contract, the internal magnetic field is amplified in the process. The strengthened field then exerts an additional pressure inside the star, providing extra support against the immense gravitational squeeze and allowing the star to hold up more mass than degeneracy pressure alone could sustain. This magnetic support alters the usual relationship between a white dwarf’s mass and its radius, producing new mass limits whose exact values depend on the detailed physics assumed for the magnetic field.

The quantitative contrast between magnetised and unmagnetised models is striking. In one simulation, the team started with a main-sequence star of 8 solar masses, which evolved into a carbon-oxygen white dwarf of 1.02 solar masses. Placed in a binary and fed matter at a rate of 10⁻⁹ solar masses per year, the magnetised model was able to grow to a limiting mass of about 2.4 solar masses, while the corresponding non-magnetised model stalled at the familiar value of roughly 1.4 solar masses. In other words, the magnetic field effectively raised the ceiling on the star’s mass by about a full solar mass, a difference large enough to change both the star’s ultimate fate and the character of any explosion it might eventually produce.

The magnetic mechanism may also resolve a long-standing puzzle in observations of individual white dwarfs. Some well-studied stars in this class have radii that are larger than standard models predict for their measured, relatively low masses, an anomaly that has resisted straightforward explanation. The simulations suggest that the same magnetic pressure that supports extra mass can also inflate the star’s size, offering a natural account of why certain white dwarfs appear puffier than their masses would suggest. If confirmed, this would connect the super-Chandrasekhar scenario to a broader range of observed stellar remnants and provide an independent diagnostic of strong internal magnetism in compact stars.

The implications for cosmology could be equally significant. Type Ia supernovae serve as standardisable candles, the calibrated beacons used to measure distances across the universe and to chart its expansion. If some fraction of these explosions originate from progenitors whose masses and magnetic properties differ substantially from the canonical picture, their luminosities may not follow the same calibration as the rest of the population. Understanding this diversity, the researchers argue, could be essential when interpreting the brightness of individual supernovae and, by extension, when drawing conclusions about the expansion history of the universe. The study, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on 8 October 2026 under the title describing super-Chandrasekhar white dwarfs from the evolution of magnetised main-sequence stars, marks a shift in the field: from asking whether magnetic fields can modify a famous limit on paper, to demonstrating with evolutionary simulations that nature may have found a way to do so in real stars.

Subject of Research: Magnetic field effects on white dwarf mass limits and super-Chandrasekhar stellar evolution

Article Title: Strong magnetic fields could allow white dwarfs to grow beyond the Chandrasekhar limit

Article References: Strong magnetic fields could allow white dwarfs to grow beyond the Chandrasekhar limit. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: white dwarfs, Chandrasekhar limit, magnetic fields, Type Ia supernovae, stellar evolution, Indian Institute of Science, The Astrophysical Journal Letters, electron degeneracy pressure, binary accretion, standard candles, cosmology, super-Chandrasekhar

Sunrise-III is an international collaborative project built around a one-meter solar telescope suspended beneath a high-altitude balloon. During its 2024 flight, the observatory floated through Earth’s stratosphere at an altitude of roughly 35 kilometers, far above the turbulent air that blurs images taken from the ground. From this vantage point the telescope can observe the Sun with very little atmospheric distortion, achieving a level of detail that ground-based instruments struggle to match even with the most sophisticated adaptive optics. The gondola carried three instruments developed by teams in different countries, each designed to probe a different layer of the solar atmosphere.

Among them, the Sunrise Chromospheric Infrared spectroPolarimeter, or SCIP, was developed under the leadership of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. SCIP is a near-infrared spectropolarimeter, an instrument that measures the polarization of sunlight at infrared wavelengths. Because magnetic fields alter the polarization states of spectral lines through physical processes such as the Zeeman effect, these polarization signatures encode the strength and direction of the magnetic field at the height where each spectral line forms. SCIP’s particular strength is its ability to continuously observe the magnetic field from the photosphere, the visible surface of the Sun, up through the chromosphere, the layer of atmosphere immediately above it.

The new observations targeted quiet-Sun regions, which cover most of the solar surface. Although these areas appear placid compared with active regions dominated by sunspots, they are permeated by magnetic fields that are simply weaker and more finely structured. That weakness is precisely what makes them difficult to measure. Ground-based telescopes must contend with blurring caused by Earth’s atmosphere, which smears out the small-scale magnetic features before their light can be analyzed. The high-precision measurements made possible by Sunrise-III’s stratospheric platform allowed the team to map the chromospheric magnetic field above quiet regions in fine detail for the first time.

What SCIP revealed was a surprise. Above a quiet-Sun region, the team identified thin, elongated, thread-like magnetic structures embedded within what solar physicists call the magnetic canopy. The canopy forms in the chromosphere as magnetic fields concentrated at the photosphere arc outward with increasing altitude, creating an overarching arch of magnetic structures above the quieter field below. The conventional picture treated this canopy as a relatively simple, smoothly expanding structure. The Sunrise-III data showed instead that it contains numerous thin, elongated magnetic substructures, more like a dense weave of fine threads than a broad, uniform sheet.

To understand what these threads represent, the team turned to numerical simulations. The simulations reproduced the thread-like structures seen by SCIP and indicated that they are associated with magnetic field lines twisted by motions at the solar surface. In this picture, the constant churning of convective plasma at the photosphere grabs the feet of magnetic field lines and winds them up, imparting a twist that propagates upward into the chromosphere. When viewed in observation, such twisted bundles of field lines appear as the fine, elongated threads that SCIP detected. The agreement between the observed structures and the simulated twisted field lines provides a physical interpretation for a phenomenon that had previously been resolved only in models.

In a separate set of observations, Sunrise-III turned its attention to a quiet-Sun region near the solar limb, the visible edge of the Sun. Viewing the Sun edge-on allows instruments to look at atmospheric structures from the side rather than from above, which is particularly valuable for studying features that extend vertically. There the observatory mapped the magnetic fields of spicules, jet-like structures that extend upward from the solar surface into the chromosphere and beyond. The measurements revealed how the distribution of the magnetic field varies with height above the limb, providing a vertical profile of magnetism through a region that is otherwise extremely difficult to characterize.

Spicules have long interested solar physicists because they are ubiquitous, appearing across the solar surface, and because they may play a role in transporting mass and energy into the upper solar atmosphere. By measuring their magnetic fields directly, Sunrise-III adds a crucial dimension to their study. Knowing how the field strength and geometry change with height in and around spicules constrains models of how these jets are driven and whether they can channel enough energy upward to matter for atmospheric heating. The new height-resolved magnetic maps from a quiet region near the limb represent exactly the kind of observational constraint that has been missing.

The broader significance of the results lies in one of the enduring puzzles of solar physics: why the Sun’s outer atmosphere is so much hotter than its visible surface. The photosphere sits at roughly 5,500 degrees Celsius, yet the chromosphere above it is hotter still, and the corona beyond it reaches temperatures of more than a million degrees. Some form of energy transport must carry heat upward against this gradient, and magnetic fields are the leading candidate, since they can channel energy generated by surface motions into the upper atmosphere. The discovery that quiet-Sun regions are filled with fine, twisted magnetic substructures suggests that even the calmest parts of the Sun may be quietly feeding energy into the atmosphere above them.

Because quiet regions cover most of the solar surface, the magnetic complexity found there could be globally important rather than a local curiosity. If twisted field lines throughout the quiet Sun routinely carry energy upward, the cumulative contribution to chromospheric and coronal heating could be substantial, complementing the energy released by active regions during flares and eruptions. The Sunrise-III results provide important clues to understanding how energy is transported from the solar surface into the atmosphere, and they demonstrate the value of stratospheric observation as a bridge between ground-based telescopes and space missions. As the team continues to analyze the 2024 flight data, the fine magnetic weaving above the quiet Sun may yield further insights into the hidden machinery that powers our nearest star.

Subject of Research: Chromospheric magnetic field structure in quiet-Sun regions observed by the balloon-borne Sunrise-III solar observatory

Article Title: Stratospheric observatory Sunrise-III reveals intricate solar magnetic structures

Article References: Stratospheric observatory Sunrise-III reveals intricate solar magnetic structures. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Sunrise-III, solar physics, magnetic fields, quiet Sun, chromosphere, spicules, magnetic canopy, spectropolarimetry, balloon observatory, NAOJ, solar atmosphere heating, The Astrophysical Journal Letters