Written by: Jesse Jenkins

A solar eruption that seemed poised to blast into space instead stalled and collapsed — and radio observations from NJIT’s Expanded Owens Valley Solar Array (EOVSA) helped reveal the magnetic forces that brought it down.

In a new study, published May 20 in Nature Astronomy, an international team of researchers has described one of the clearest multi‑view observations yet of a “failed” solar eruption.

Written by: Jesse Jenkins

Solar flares are among the most violent events in the solar system, releasing energy equivalent to millions of hydrogen bombs and propelling particles to near-light speed in seconds.

Yet only a small fraction of those particles ever escapes into interplanetary space. Why do so few make it out of the Sun’s atmosphere — and what happens to the rest?

Those questions have driven Meiqi Wang’s research since she arrived at NJIT as a Ph.D. student in 2019, years of work that earned her NJIT’s Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award at Commencement 2026.

Written by: Jesse Jenkins

As this month’s string of powerful X-class solar flares sparked brilliant aurorae that lit up skies across an unusually wide swath of the globe — from northern Europe to Florida — researchers at NJIT’s Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research (CSTR) captured a less visible, but crucial, record of the storm’s impact on Earth’s upper atmosphere.

Written by: Jesse Jenkins

Billions upon billions of soot particles enter Earth’s atmosphere each second, totaling about 5.8 million metric tons a year — posing a climate-warming impact previously estimated at almost one-third that of carbon dioxide.

Now, researchers say the climate-altering properties of these particles can change within just hours of becoming airborne, rather than days as previously assumed.

The Sun’s corona—the outermost layer of its atmosphere, visible only during a total solar eclipse—has long intrigued scientists due to its extreme temperatures, violent eruptions, and large prominences. However, turbulence in the Earth’s atmosphere has caused image blur and hindered observations of the corona. A ground-breaking recent development by scientists from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) National Solar Observatory (NSO), and New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), is changing that by using adaptive optics to remove the blur.

Written by: Jesse Jenkins

New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) chemist Pier Alexandre Champagne has received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to advance the understanding of sulfur-containing molecules that are key to cellular defense and health, but transform so quickly into different compounds — within fractions of a second — that scientists have struggled to understand them.

Written by: Jesse Jenkins

New Jersey Institute of Technology biologist Xiaonan Tai has received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to investigate how landscape positions determine forest fate during extreme heat and drought — a factor that could help explain why some forests perish while others survive.

The CAREER Award, among NSF’s most prestigious honors for junior faculty, includes a grant of $1,162,914 to support Tai’s project, “Unveiling the Role of Hillslope Hydrology in Mediating Ecosystem Response to Drought,” over the next five years.

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