Magnetic fields play an important—if sometimes underappreciated—part in planetary systems. Without a strong magnetic field, planets can end up as a barren wasteland like Mars, or they could indirectly ...

Scientists have long known that migrating birds and homing pigeons navigate in part by sensing the Earth’s magnetic fields, especially at night or in overcast conditions when visual landmarks or ...

In the late 1800s, the French naturalist Camille Viguier proposed an idea that would be dismissed and forgotten for more than a century. He speculated that birds and other animals could navigate with ...

The Animal That Reads the Earth A reef manta ray tagged off the Maldives in 2015 travelled over 1,100 kilometres in a single ...

Geophysicists have modeled how Earth’s magnetic field could form even when its core was fully liquid. By removing the effects of viscosity in their simulation, they revealed a self-sustaining dynamo ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. David Bressan is a geologist who covers curiosities about Earth. Nov 28, 2025, 07:59am EST Map of the strength of the Earth's ...

How fast can a galaxy build ordered magnetic fields spanning thousands of light-years? Existing theories say several billion years, but observations of galaxies in our universe imply shorter ...

Pigeons and other birds can do it. So can sea turtles and spiny lobsters, moths and mole rats, gray whales and big brown bats. Many members of the animal kingdom can detect the subtle undulations of ...

While we have sent probes billions of kilometres into interstellar space, humans have barely scratched the surface of our own planet, not even making it through the thin crust. Roughly 3,000km beneath ...

Deep inside the Milky Way, an invisible force is quietly holding everything together — its magnetic field. Now, researchers have created one of the most detailed maps ever of this hidden structure, ...

As black holes feed, they pull material into a disk around them. The material orbiting in this disk gets heated to extreme temperatures, and so it becomes a plasma — a state of matter in which some of ...