ScienceDaily: Space & Time News

The famed northern and southern lights have been studied for millennia, but they still hold secrets. Physicists describe a new phenomenon they call 'diffuse auroral erasers,' in which patches of the background glow are blotted out, then suddenly intensify and reappear.

New observations and simulations show that jets of high-energy particles emitted from the central massive black hole in the brightest galaxy in galaxy clusters can be used to map the structure of invisible inter-cluster magnetic fields. These findings provide astronomers with a new tool for investigating previously unexplored aspects of clusters of galaxies.