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NASA space telescope maps magnetic fields of ‘Lighthouse’ pulsar

For the first time, scientists have used NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) to directly measure the magnetic fields of PSR J1101−6101, a pulsar located within what is often referred to as the Lighthouse Nebula. The results provide new insight into the structure of some of the most extreme objects in the cosmos, as NASA continues to explore the secrets of how the universe works. A paper describing the results was published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal.

A pulsar is a type of neutron star with a strong magnetic field that spins incredibly fast. The pulsar at the center of the Lighthouse Nebula is rotating 16 times per second. Neutron stars are the leftover cores of massive stars, formed at the end of their life cycles, that possess more mass than the sun. They are condensed down to the size of a city, making them natural laboratories for studying extreme physics.

In June 2025, IXPE spent nearly 18 days focused on the Lighthouse Nebula.

New model maps solar storms across 1 million miles around Earth

A team at the Applied Physics Lab is working to understand the complex science behind predicting invisible threats that can quickly cripple electric grid infrastructure on Earth.

On the morning of Sept. 1, 1859, telegraph operators all over North America and Europe suddenly lost control of their machines. Lines disconnected. Wires sparked and caught fire. Operators received electric shocks.

The source of this widespread disturbance was more than 150 million kilometers (more than 93 million miles) away: the sun. That night, a solar storm caused brilliant auroras to appear far beyond Earth’s poles, waking people in some regions who mistook the light for morning.

Dark energy flips its sign, but the Hubble tension refuses to budge

For nearly a century, astronomers have known that the universe is expanding. In the late 1990s, two independent teams, the Supernova Cosmology Project, led by Saul Perlmutter, and the High-Z Supernova Search Team, led by Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess, discovered something strange: The expansion is speeding up. The finding earned them the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. The leading explanation for this acceleration is “dark energy,” a mysterious force usually modeled as a constant called Lambda, pushing space apart. Combined with cold dark matter, this gives us the LCDM model, the standard picture of the cosmos for the past 25 years.

LCDM is remarkably successful. It fits observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), i.e., the leftover glow from the Big Bang, as well as maps of galaxy clustering and the brightness of exploding stars called Type Ia supernovae. But it has one nagging problem: the Hubble tension.

Cosmologists have proposed dark energy that switches sign over cosmic history. A rigorous new analysis published in Physical Review D checks whether it actually closes the gap.

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