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.

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.

NJIT’s Jordan Hu College of Science & Liberal Arts (HCSLA) celebrated 44 years on May 6 with its annual awards ceremony, headlined by a special guest appearance from paleontologist and famed “dinosaur hunter” Dr. Kenneth J. Lacovara.

Held in the Central King Building’s Agile Strategy Lab, the event brought together students, faculty, and alumni alongside President Teik C. Lim to recognize the past year’s achievements across NJIT’s most academically diverse college, from the humanities to STEM sciences.

If you wanted to see how AI and research across the humanities and sciences are reshaping each other in real time, NJIT’s Jordan Hu College of Science and Liberal Arts (HCSLA) offered a front-row seat during the university’s first AI Exploration Day.

The all-day AI takeover of campus highlighted the college’s diverse faculty and student research — covering everything from what the future holds for ethical AI design and robotics, to the latest AI-assisted efforts to alert Earth of eruptions on the Sun.

In an analysis of nearly three decades of solar acoustic data, NJIT physicists report evidence that the solar dynamo — the magnetic engine powering the Sun’s 11-year cycles and eruptive events — operates nearly 200,000 kilometers beneath the Sun’s surface.

Every eleven years, the Sun’s magnetic field flips. Sunspots — dark, cooler regions on the Sun’s surface that mark intense magnetic activity and often trigger solar eruptions —appear at mid-latitudes and migrate toward the star’s equator in a butterfly-shape pattern before fading as the cycle resets.

Solar physicists say they have found a key source of intense gamma rays unleashed when Earth’s nearest star produces its most violent eruptions.

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.