Tag: Solar System

Satellites watch ‘ghost island’ solidify in the Caspian Sea before disappearing (photos)

NeRD

We like to think of land as a fairly static thing, considering that’s where we spend the majority of our lives. And to think that the ground is ever-changing, well, that’s a bit unsettling. But the reality is land is always changing — perhaps nowhere more so than at the Kumani Bank mud volcano, also known as Chigil-Deniz, some 15 miles (25 km) off the coast of Azerbaijan in the Caspian Sea. The NASA Earth Observatory has released a series of images taken with the Operational Land Imager (OLI) and…

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Scientists turn 3 years’ worth of solar flares into audible sound (video)

NeRD

If you’re more of an auditory learner than a visual one, this timelapse video is for you. (And, well, visual learners will probably love it, too!) The European Space Agency (ESA) has released an audio-visual representation of solar activity over the last three years, pulling data from its Solar Orbiter probe, which it runs with NASA. In the video, we see blue circles popping up across the surface of the sun — and audible tones paired with each of these circles. As time progresses toward the present day, the frequency…

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An amateur astronomer used an old technique to study Jupiter — and found something strange

NeRD

Scientists and amateur astronomers have teamed up to upend a long-held assumption that Jupiter’s iconic swirling clouds are made of frozen ammonia — a pretty foundational revelation about the gas giant we thought we knew well. Using commercially available telescopes and spectral filters, an amateur astronomer named Steve Hill collected data to map the abundance of ammonia in Jupiter‘s atmosphere, but Hill ultimately found something that contradicted previous models of the gas giant’s atmospheric composition to begin with. “I was intrigued!” Patrick Irwin from the University of Oxford told Space.com.…

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Springtime on Mars brings frost avalanches, gas geysers and explosions (photos)

NeRD

Instead of chilled glasses and champagne bubbles to ring in the New Year, how about gassy geysers and frosty avalanches? That’s exactly what you can expect as the Martian New Year begins on the Red Planet with the onset of spring across its Northern Hemisphere. The term “walking in a winter wonderland” on Mars consists more like sprinting across the surface, having to dodge the crash of cliffsides and explosions of carbon dioxide. Unlike our northern hemisphere on Earth, on the Red Planet, the new year starts off with the…

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Sun erupts with powerful X1.2 solar flare, causes radio blackouts (photo)

NeRD

The sun started 2025 with a bang as it fired off a powerful solar flare this morning. The X-class solar flare peaked at an X.12 at 6:40 a.m. EST (1140 GMT) on Friday (Jan. 3), releasing a blast of energy from a sunspot region known as AR 3947 and triggering a radio blackout event for parts of the Southern Atlantic, Africa and parts of eastern South America. When these blackouts happen, they can result in a full or partial loss of high frequency (HF) radio signals in regions that are…

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‘Ambitious climate action is more urgent than ever:’ 3 Climate records broken in 2024

NeRD

The year 2024 has been another challenging one for Earth’s climate, marked by record temperatures, extreme weather events, and urgent warnings from scientists about the accelerating pace of global warming. An analysis by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), the European Union agency that tracks global warming, suggests this year will be the hottest since instrument record keeping began more than a century ago — beating climate records set just last year. 2024 will also be the first calendar year in which the global average temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius…

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Get ready for the ‘New Year Comet’: What to expect from Comet ATLAS (C/2024) G3

NeRD

In the second week of 2025, we could see a new object grace the skies as comet ATLAS (C/2024) G3 gets close to the sun. In the wake of comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) in October, comet G3 is due to reach perihelion — its closest to the sun — on Jan. 13, 2025. That day, this icy visitor to the inner solar system will get to within just 8.3 million miles (13.5 million kilometers) from the sun. For context, Mercury orbits the sun from as close as 29 million miles…

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Christmas solar flares erupt from the sun. Will they trigger aurora ‘fireworks’ as we close out 2024?

NeRD

In the final hours of Christmas Day, the sun fired off four solar flares within less than three hours. The biggest flare of the series, recorded at a M7.3, erupted from sunspot region AR3938 on Dec. 25 at 10:15 p,m. EST (0315 GMT on Dec. 26). Solar flares are ranked and categorized by their power on a 4-level classification scale, with M-class the second strongest to the beastly X-class at the top. According to Spaceweather.com, this was part of a group of four different flares that happened within two and…

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Scientists await signal from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe after historic close sun flyby. Will it phone home?

NeRD

On the heels of a NASA spacecraft’s historic close flyby of the sun on Christmas Eve, scientists on Earth have one question on their minds: Did their probe survive as an epic Christmas gift, or is it a burned up lump of coal in space? For a few days, they simply won’t know, at least not until the spacecraft — NASA’s Parker Solar Probe — phones home with a simple “status beacon” on Friday (Dec. 27) to let its science team know it’s okay. But scientists behind the spacecraft’s sun…

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Just a fraction of the hydrogen hidden beneath Earth’s surface could power Earth for 200 years, scientists find

NeRD

A mountain of hydrogen is lurking beneath Earth’s surface — and scientists say that just a fraction of it could break our dependence on fossil fuels for 200 years. New research suggests the planet holds around 6.2 trillion tons (5.6 trillion metric tons) of hydrogen in rocks and underground reservoirs. That’s roughly 26 times the amount of oil known to be left in the ground (1.6 trillion barrels, each weighing approximately 0.15 tons) — but where these hydrogen stocks are located remains unknown. Most of the hydrogen is likely too…

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