Astrophysical magnetic fields articles from across Nature Portfolio

Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) waves observed on the Sun help understanding solar plasma and involved processes. Here, the authors show resolved MHD waves in the solar corona displaying MHD lensing effect.

A state-of-the-art simulation reveals that the long-lasting 10 MK plasma in solar active regions can be heated by magnetic reconnections driven by continuous flux emergence that repeatedly deposit impulsive heating into the coronal plasma.

Relativistic jets observed from transient neutron stars throughout the Universe produce bright flares for minutes after each X-ray burst, helping to determine the role individual system properties have on the speed and revealing the dominant launching mechanism.

The interstellar medium (ISM) is critical to galaxy evolution. Here, the authors show dust processing modelling applied to magnetohydrodynamic simulations to explicitly follow dust destruction by the combined effects of grain-grain collisions and ion-sputtering induced by a supernova blast wave in a turbulent multiphase, magnetized ISM.

X-ray observations of two large glitches bracketing a fast radio burst in the active Galactic magnetar SGR 1935+2154 reveal a connection between rapid spin change and radiative behaviours of the magnetar.

The current understanding of the origin and properties of cluster magnetic fields is limited by observational challenges. Here, the authors show that magnetic field orientations of galaxy clusters, including radio relic and radio halos, can be derived via combination of synchrotron intensity gradient technique with radio observations.

Binary neutron star mergers are complex to understand astrophysically. A small piece of the puzzle may now have been solved using a computationally intensive simulation to explain how short gamma-ray bursts can be launched by a magnetar engine.

Recent detection of polarized thermal emission from dust grains in a high-redshift, rapidly star-forming galaxy can give us an insight into the formation and evolution of magnetic fields in large-scale structures of the early Universe.

The different roles of outflows in the removal of angular momentum from young stellar systems are becoming clearer with high-angular-resolution spectral-line studies.

The mechanisms that generate magnetic fields in stars are complex, but computational models of dynamo action show how magnetic fields can be generated by extremely turbulent flows.

The first maps of the magnetic field in the nebula surrounding the Crab pulsar have been drawn using X-ray polarimetry. They provide insight into the flow of relativistic particles through the nebula and the generation of turbulence.