Solar Astronomy | Universe Today

Exploring the Sun via helium balloon almost sounds like an adventure for an animated movie, but the SUNRISE balloon-borne telescope has captured data and images that show the complex interplay on the solar surface to a level of detail never before achieved. As in the video above, SUNRISE shows our local star to be a bubbling, boiling mass where packages of gas rise and sink, lending the sun its grainy surface structure. Dark spots appear and disappear, clouds of matter dart up – and behind the whole thing are the magnetic fields, the engines of it all.
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In a case of being in the right place at the right time, the MESSENGER spacecraft was able to capture a average-sized solar flare, allowing astronomers to study high-energy solar neutrons at less than 1 astronomical unit (AU) from the sun for the first time. When the flare erupted on Dec. 31, 2007, MESSENGER – on course for entering orbit around Mercury — was flying at about half an AU, said William C. Feldman, a scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. Previously, only the neutron bursts from the most powerful solar flares have been recorded on neutron spectrometers on Earth or in near-Earth orbit. The MESSENGER results help solve a mystery of why some coronal mass ejections produce almost no energetic protons that reach the Earth, while others produce huge amounts.
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Accurate timing of the incoming ENAs allows the IBEX team to obtain a higher resolution in the latitudinal direction. The inset at right shows some of the fine detail of the ribbon. Credit: Southwest Research Institute (SwRI)

Since it launched a year ago, the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) has been monitoring heliosphere and how our Sun interacts with and the local interstellar medium — the gas and dust trapped in the vacuum of space. The first results from the mission, combined with data from the Cassini mission, are showing the heliosphere to be different from what researchers have previously thought. Data show an unexpected bright band or ribbon of surprisingly high-energy emissions. "We knew there would be energetic neutral atoms coming in from the very edge of the heliosphere, and our theories said there would be small variations in their emissions," said David McComas, IBEX Principal Investigator at a press conference on Thursday. "But instead we are seeing two-to-three hundred percent variations, and this is not entirely understood. Whatever we thought about this before is definitely not right."
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Two sunspots appeared on old Sol yesterday just as Earth's orbit ushered in the Autumnal Equinox. Two sunspots showing up at once hasn't happened in more than a year, and over 80% of the days in 2009 have been "sunspotless" during this deepest solar minimum in a century. Spaceweather.com had a great picture, below, of the first sunspot that appeared, #1026, taken by astrophotographer Peter Lawrence. Lawrence said there was a lot going on around the new sunspot. "The spot's dark core is surrounded by active fibrils and a swirling magnetic filament that gives the region a nice 3D appearance."
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A new, temporary radiation belt has been detected at Saturn, located about 377,000 km from the center of the planet, near the orbit of the moon Dione. The temporary radiation belt was short-lived and formed three times in 2005. It was observed as sudden increases in the intensity of high energy charged particles in the inner part of Saturn's magnetosphere, in the vicinity of the moons Dione and Tethys, and likely was caused by a change in the intensities of cosmic rays at Saturn.
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Eclipse from Chongqing Municipality (Xinhua/Liu Chan)

The total solar eclipse which just occurred on the 22nd of July 2009 was the longest maximum duration of the 21st century. Not since Saros 1991 have astronomers and eclipse chasers been treat to such an event! Totality lasted over six and a half minutes at maximum. duration. The event started in India along the western shore near Surat moved towards Butan and reached the southern tip of Nepal and the northern edge of Bangladesh.

For other lucky astronomers like Vietnamese student Dang Anh Tuan at Hanoi National University of Education, the eclipse path also took the event over cities like Chengdu, Suining, Chonging, Wuhan, Xiaogan, Hangzhou, and Shanghai – and event which yielded five minutes of totality. Leaving Shanghai the shadow path raced across the ocean, to fall across islands such as Toshima and Akusaki south of Japan and eventually the Marshall islands. Where was the longest point? The maximum eclipse duration of 6 minutes and 43 seconds occurs far off the coast in the Pacific Ocean! Are you ready to become an eclipse chaser? Then follow me… Read more…

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July 22, 2009 Solar Eclipse Image Submitted By Bill Fish

The total solar eclipse which just occured on the 22nd of July 2009 was the longest in terms of maximum totality duration of the 21st century – lasting over six and a half minutes. Not since Saros 1991 have astronomers and eclipse chasers been treated to such a length of time! The eclipse footprint started in India along the western shore near Surat moved towards Butan and reached the southern tip of Nepal and the northern edge of Bangladesh. For other lucky astronomers, the eclipse path also took the event over the Chinese cities of Chengdu, Suining, Chonging, Wuhan, Xiaogan, Hangzhou, and Shanghai – yielding five minutes of totality. Leaving Shanghai the shadow raced across the ocean to fall across islands such as Toshima and Akusaki south of Japan and eventually the Marshall islands. Where did the longest time occur? The maximum eclipse duration of 6 minutes and 43 seconds was far off the coast in the Pacific Ocean! As I write this announcement, our readers are sending in their photos and stories to my home email (send them!!) and I just couldn't wait to show you some of the beginning results. It will take a short time to do a little translation work… But it's a small, wonderful world and this article will be updated very soon!

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©UCAR, image courtesy Matthias Rempel, NCAR

Seriously, I don't think we should stare at this too long … but for scientists who plan to, this new, high-resolution view of a sunspot stands to unlock secrets of the Sun's mysterious energetics.

In the just-released image above, the interface between a sunspot's umbra (dark center) and penumbra (lighter outer region) shows a complex structure with narrow, almost horizontal (lighter to white) filaments embedded in a background having a more vertical (darker to black) magnetic field. Farther out, extended patches of horizontal field dominate. For the first time, scientists have modeled this complex structure in a comprehensive 3D computer simulation, giving scientists their first glimpse below the visible surface.

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The Sun has seen precious few sunspots (as shown in this NASA closeup) in the past year, and solar physicists have been working to understand why. Now, some think they have an answer.

According to work being presented this week at the meeting of the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society, a solar jet stream deep inside the Sun is migrating slower than usual through the star’s interior and it's at least associated with — if not causing — the current lull in sunspots and solar activity.

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OK, I admit – the headline is a little over the top. But the sun has been so quiet of late, that even a small sunspot can be exciting. There's been some debate whether this period of extreme solar calm is truly unusual, or just part of the natural cycle. But solar cycle models never predicted this low amount of activity. "It turns out that none of our models were totally correct," admitted Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center, a member of an international panel of experts that are now trying to predict what the next solar cycle will hold. "The sun is behaving in an unexpected and very interesting way."
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Illustration Credit: Simon Swordy (U. Chicago), NASA

People looking for new ways to explain climate change on Earth have sometimes turned to cosmic rays, showers of atomic nuclei that emanate from the Sun and other sources in the cosmos. 

But new research, in press in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, says cosmic rays are puny compared to other climatic influences, including greenhouse gases — and not likely to impact Earth's climate much.

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Scientists have long understood that satellites are at risk from bombardment by solar storms. Now, they've gotten a closer look at how the storms are punishing Earth's magnetosphere, leaving satellites exposed.

The movie above, and the solar flare video below, were released by the European Space Agency today, along with descriptions of two solar eruptions spotted using ESA’s four Cluster satellites and the two Chinese/ESA Double Star satellites. 

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If you think tornadoes on Earth are scary, newly found "space tornadoes" sound downright horrifying. But they are likely the power source behind the beautiful Northern and Southern Lights. A new finding by a cluster of five space probes – the THEMIS, or Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms show that electrical funnels which span a volume as large as Earth produce electrical currents exceeding 100,000 amperes. THEMIS recorded the extent and power of these electrical funnels as the probes passed through them during their orbit of Earth. Ground measurements showed that the space tornadoes channel the electrical current into the ionosphere to spark bright and colorful auroras on Earth.
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S-shaped structures called 'Sigmoids' have been found in the outer atmosphere of the Sun — the corona. Sigmoids are thought to be a crucial part of explosive events like solar flares. Now a group of astronomers have developed the first model to reproduce and explain the nature of the different stages of a sigmoid’s life. Recently, the X-Ray Telescope (XRT) on board the Hinode space mission was used to obtain the first images of the formation and eruption phase of a sigmoid at high resolution. These observations revealed sigmoids have very complex structures.
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Wouldn't it be great if solar physicists could predict sun storms just like meteorologist predict hurricanes? Well, now perhaps they can. NASA’s twin STEREO observatories have made the first 3-D measurements of solar explosions, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), allowing scientists to see their size and shape, and image them as they travel approximately 93 million miles from the sun to Earth. With STEREO, scientists can now capture images of solar storms and make real-time measurements of their magnetic fields, much the same way that satellites allow forecasters to see the development of a hurricane. Eruptions from the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, can wreak havoc on satellites (and astronauts) in orbit or induce large currents in power grids on Earth, which can cause power disruptions or black outs.

"We can now see a CME from the time it leaves the solar surface until it reaches Earth, and we can reconstruct the event in 3D directly from the images," said Angelos Vourlidas, a solar physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, and project scientist for the Sun Earth Connection Coronal and Heliospheric Investigation aboard STEREO. In the video above, see some of the 3-D imagery, and hear Vourlidas talk about about the new findings.
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