Space and astronomy news
A new image from the world’s largest solar observatory shows a spectacular, high resolution view of a gigantic sunspot. The sunpspot measures about 16,000 km (10,000 miles) across, large enough that Earth could fit inside.
Continue reading “A Sunspot Seen by the Most Powerful Solar Telescope in the World”
Like all stars, our Sun is powered by the fusion of hydrogen into heavier elements. Nuclear fusion is not only what makes stars shine, it is also a primary source of the chemical elements that make the world around us. Much of our understanding of stellar fusion comes from theoretical models of atomic nuclei, but for our closest star, we also have another source: neutrinos created in the Sun’s core.
Continue reading “Neutrinos prove the Sun is doing a second kind of fusion in its core”
Flares from the sun are some of the nastiest things in the solar system. When the sun flares, it belches out intense X-ray radiation (and sometimes even worse). Predicting solar flares is a tricky job, and a new research paper sheds light on a possible new technique: looking for telltale ripples in the surface of the sun minutes before the blast comes.
Continue reading “Do Ripples on the Surface of the Sun tell us that a Flare is Coming?”
The European Space Agency launched the Gaia mission in 2013. The mission’s overall goal was to discover the history of the Milky Way by mapping out the positions and velocities of one billion stars. The result is kind of like a movie that shows the past and the future of our galaxy.
The mission has released two separate, massive data sets for researchers to work through, with a third data release expected soon. All that data has spawned a stream of studies into our home galaxy.
Recently, the ESA drew attention to five new insights into the Milky Way galaxy. Allof these discoveries directly stemmed from the Gaia spacecraft.
Continue reading “Gaia has Already Given Us 5 New Insights Into the Milky Way”
Everything in space is moving. Galaxies collide and merge, massive clouds of gas migrate, and asteroids, comets, and rogue planets zip around and between it all. And in our own Solar System, the planets follow their ancient orbits.
Now a new data visualization shows us just how much our view from Earth changes in two years, as the orbits of the planets change the distance between us and our neighbours.
Continue reading “Check Out How Big the Planets and the Moon Will be in Our Sky Over the Next Two Years”
At first glance, it looks like something from an alien autopsy. A strange organ cut from a xenomorph’s thorax, under the flickering lights of an operating room in a top secret government facility, with venous tendrils dangling down to the floor, dripping viscous slime. (X-Com anyone?)
But no, it’s just our Solar System.
Continue reading “This is What the Solar System Really Looks Like”
Since it launched in 2010, the Solar Dynamics Observatory has helped scientists understand how the Sun’s magnetic field is generated and structured, and what causes solar flares. One of the main goals of the mission was to be able to create forecasts for predicting activity on the Sun.
Using mission data from the past 10 years, SDO scientists have now developed a new model that successfully predicted seven of the Sun’s biggest flares from the last solar cycle, out of a set of nine.
Continue reading “New Solar Model Successfully Predicted Seven of the Sun’s Last Nine Big Flares”
I forget the Sun is a star.
I think we all do sometimes. It’s easy to take for granted. The Sun is that glowing thing that rises in the morning and sets in the evening that we don’t generally pay attention to as we go about our day. However, there are these rare moments when we’re reminded that the Sun is truly a STAR – a titanic living sphere of hydrogen smashing plasma a million times the volume of Earth. One of those rare moments for me was standing in the shadow of the 2017 solar eclipse. We had driven down from Vancouver to Madras, Oregon to watch this astronomical freak of nature. A moon hundreds of times smaller than the Sun, but hundreds of times closer, covers the face of the Sun for the majesty of a STAR to be revealed; the fiery maelstrom of the Sun’s atmosphere visible to the naked eye.
In the beginning, the big bang created three elements: hydrogen, helium, and lithium. But it only produced a trace of lithium. For every lithium atom created, the big bang produced about 10 billion hydrogen atoms, and 3 billion helium atoms. The ratio of primordial elements is one of the triumphs of the big bang model. It predicts the ratio of hydrogen (H) and helium (4He) perfectly, and even works for the ratios of other isotopes, such as deuterium (2H) and helium-3 (3He). But it doesn’t work for lithium, and we aren’t sure why.
Continue reading “Stars Like Our Sun Become Lithium Factories as They Die”
Newborn exoplanets can have a tough life. They may form an atmosphere, but that atmosphere can be doomed. Their stars can emit intense X-ray and UV radiation, stripping away those atmospheres and laying their surfaces bare.
A team of researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics looked at a family of four newborn sibling planets, and tried to understand how their star strips away their gaseous envelopes.
Continue reading “Newborn Exoplanets can be Completely Stripped of Their Atmosphere by Stars”