Space and astronomy news
Even though our Sun is now a solitary star, it still has siblings somewhere in the Milky Way. Stars form in massive clouds of gas called Molecular Clouds. When the Sun formed about five billion years ago, other stars would’ve formed from the same cloud, creating a star cluster.
How many other stars formed in the cluster?
Continue reading “How Many Stars Formed Together With the Sun in Our Stellar Nebula?”
Dark matter continues to vex astronomers around the world. We see its effects in the clustering of galaxies and the gravitational lensing of light within galaxies, and it seems to comprise about 80% of the matter in the universe, but we still haven’t detected it on Earth. So what about at least detecting it in our solar system? That might be possible according to a new study in Nature Astronomy.
Continue reading “Want to Learn More About Dark Matter? Send an Atomic Clock Close to the Sun”
Our Sun is the very reason we’re alive. It provides warmth and the energy our planet needs to keep going. Now you can add photogenic to its illustrious résumé, as NASA recently photographed our giant ball of nuclear fusion doing something quite peculiar.
Continue reading “The Sun Could Hurl Powerful Storms at Earth From its Goofy Smile”
The Sun is active, dynamic, and occasionally violent. Unfortunately our view of the Sun is limited to a small handful of orbiting satellites and ground-based observatories. The Solar Ring is new proposal that hopes to radically change that picture by launching a trio of satellites around the Sun to give continuous, 360° panoramic images in real time. The observatory could revolutionize our understanding of our parent star.
Continue reading “Meet The Solar Ring: A Proposed Spacecraft That Will Have a Panoramic View of the Sun”
The sun is currently sleeping. Its surface and corona are relatively quiet as it prepares to ramp up for an expected phase of high activity in 2025. This past October, the ESA’s Solar Orbiter was able to sneak in a close-up peak at the Sun as it slumbers.
Continue reading “Solar Orbiter Records a Stunning Timelapse of Solar Activity as it Completes its Latest Flyby”
Trees are like sentinels that preserve a record of shifting climates. Their growth rings hold that history and dendrochronology studies those rings. Scientists can determine the exact ages of trees and correlate their growth with climatic and environmental changes.
But they also record the effects of more distant changes, including the Sun’s activity.
Continue reading “The Most Devastating Solar Storms in History are Scoured Into Tree Rings”
If you want to learn about the history of the Sun, then look no further than the Moon. That’s the recommendation of a team of scientists who hope to harness future Artemis lunar missions to help understand the life history of our home star.
Continue reading “The History of the Sun is Written on the Moon”
Massive solar storms on the Sun are becoming more common as it moves into a period of increasing solar activity as part of Solar Cycle 25, which is expected to peak in 2025. There’s one spacecraft that will be very well placed to capture that increasing activity. Solar Orbiter is currently 25% of the way through its ten-year mission of observing the Sun. By 2025 it will be closer than ever to our parent star, and it has already started observing some fantastic phenomena from our Sun.
Continue reading “Solar Orbiter was hit by a Coronal Mass Ejection as it was About to Make a Flyby of Venus”
New images of the Sun’s chromosphere – the lower region of the solar atmosphere — have been released, and to say they are ‘stellar’ is an understatement. Simply, they are stunning. The high-resolution images were taken with the now-fully-operational Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, located on the summit of Haleakala, Maui, in Hawai‘i. Scientists say the new observatory — with its large 4-meter (13-ft) primary mirror — will enable a new era of solar science, and provide a leap forward in understanding the Sun and its impacts on our planet.
Continue reading “Insanely High-Resolution Images of the Sun Show its Chromosphere in Vivid Detail”
Comets that venture close to the Sun can transform into something beautiful, but sometimes they encounter incineration if they get too close. Of the various types of comets that orbit close to the Sun, astronomers had never seen the destruction of the type classified as “near-Sun” comets. But thanks to a variety of telescopes on summit of Mauna Kea in Hawai?i, scientists have now captured images of a periodic rocky near-Sun comet breaking apart. They say the disintegration of this comet could help explain the scarcity of such periodic near-Sun comets.
Continue reading “Astronomers Watched a “Near-Sun” Comet Disintegrate as it Flew too Close to the Sun”