sun

Officials Confirm Several Geomagnetic Storms Are Hitting Earth This Week

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The Sun is continuing its rowdy behavior, with flares and coronal mass ejections almost every day since mid-January. That means the inevitable has happened: some of those eruptions have blasted in the general direction of Earth, which means we’re in for some solar storms.   The Space Weather Prediction Center of the US National Oceanic … Read more

How Paint And a Speaker Could Explain The Physics of The Sun’s Plasma Jets

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The Sun is blanketed by spiking, ultra-hot jets of plasma created from electrically charged particles, and now scientists have figured out more about how these jets (or spicules) are created and driven up into the star’s atmosphere.   Via a series of laboratory experiments and models, a new study describes the spicules as being like … Read more

The sun readies for its close-up as Europe’s Solar Orbiter approaches

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The European Solar Orbiter mission will make its closest approach to the sun later this month, promising to capture images that could unravel some of the mysterious behaviours of the star at the heart of our solar system. Solar Orbiter, a European Space Agency (ESA) mission with a contribution from NASA, launched in February 2020. … Read more

When NASA’s Parker Solar Probe flew close by the sun, telescopes were watching from Earth and space

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Telescopes on Earth and in space had the sun safely in their sights when NASA’s Parker Solar Probe made its 11th daring close flyby of the star on Feb. 25, all to understand more about the sun’s behavior. To be clear, the Parker Solar Probe wasn’t directly visible in the various instruments, as the van-sized … Read more

An Expert Explains How Solar Storms Can So Easily Destroy Satellites

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On Feb. 4, 2022, SpaceX launched 49 satellites as part of Elon Musk‘s Starlink internet project, most of which burned up in the atmosphere days later. The cause of this more than US$50 million failure was a geomagnetic storm caused by the Sun.   Geomagnetic storms occur when space weather hits and interacts with the … Read more

Why Isn’t Jupiter a Star?

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The smallest known main-sequence star in the Milky Way galaxy is a real pixie of a thing. It’s called EBLM J0555-57Ab, a red dwarf 600 light-years away. With a mean radius of around 59,000 kilometers, it’s just a smidge bigger than Saturn. That makes it the tiniest known star to support hydrogen fusion in its core, … Read more

Stunning Loops of Plasma Observed on The Sun May Not Be What We Thought

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A well-studied solar phenomenon may not be quite as simple as we we thought it was. New simulations suggest that what we thought were loops of plasma known as coronal loops erupting out from the surface of the Sun along magnetic field lines may, at least sometimes, be wrinkles in corrugated sheets of plasma.   … Read more

This Mind-Bogglingly Gigantic Sunspot Is Roughly The Size of Our Entire Planet

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A new telescope taking on the task of staring at the Sun has delivered incredible new images of solar activity. The US National Science Foundation’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope commenced science operations for the first time on Wednesday 23 February 2022. It’s the largest solar telescope in the world, and its high-resolution observations of … Read more

Hidden Turbulence in The Atmosphere of The Sun Revealed by New AI Model

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Hidden turbulent motion that takes place inside the atmosphere of the Sun can be accurately predicted by a newly developed neural network. Fed only temperature and vertical motion data collected from the surface of the solar photosphere, the AI model could correctly identify turbulent horizontal motion below the surface. This could help us to better … Read more

NASA’s daring Parker Solar Probe spacecraft zips past the sun again today

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The Parker Solar Probe is ready to make its 11th close flyby of the sun during its quest to understand how our neighboring star works. The plucky spacecraft, heavily shielded against the sun’s radiation and extreme heat, will dip to within 5.3 million miles (8.5 million kilometers) of the solar surface on Friday (Feb. 25). … Read more