Our protective blanket helps shield us from unruly space weather. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Earth's magnetic field — also ...

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 ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. An award-winning reporter writing about stargazing and the night sky. Using 11 years of magnetic field measurements from the ...

From time to time, the Earth's magnetic poles flip, leaving us without a protective magnetic field for up to centuries ...

NOAA and the University of Colorado Boulder’s CIRES have released the 2026 High Definition Geomagnetic Model (HDGM), delivering a 20% boost in resolution for mapping Earth’s magnetic field. By ...

High magnetic fields are a vital tool in many areas of science and technology that impact our everyday lives, from medical diagnostics through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to drug discovery ...

It is not known when humans first noticed the attraction or repulsion between pieces of magnetic material. The first important device depending on these forces was the magnetic compass, which is ...

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 ...

A team of physicists and engineers at the University of Colorado Boulder has discovered a new way to measure the orientation of magnetic fields using what may be the tiniest compasses around—atoms.