Tag: The Sun

On Aug. 8, scientists may have caught hundreds of individual sunspots on images produced by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). To us, sunspots might seem really tiny — but don’t be fooled. They are actually dark areas typically the size of the entire Earth on the sun’s surface. Plus, they exhibit strong magnetic fields that can fire off solar flares, which spew pulses of electromagnetic radiation into space. These are the explosions that lead to coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that can create solar storms on Earth. “The process of the…

The sun showcased its immense power yet again this morning (August 5), firing off not one but two X-class flares. X flares are the strongest solar flare class. Today’s first X blast, which launched from a sunspot called AR3767, reached its peak around 9:40 a.m. EDT (1340 GMT), clocking in at X1.7 on solar scientists’ flare scale. Then, less than two hours later, the sunspot AR3780 fired off an X1.1 class solar flare, which peaked at 11:27 a.m. EDT (1527 GMT).  Solar flares are often accompanied by huge eruptions of solar…

Scientists have long wondered why the hot soup of charged particles in our sun’s atmosphere gets hotter moving away from the surface of the sun. New research may have the answer, finding the super-hot nature of the sun’s outer atmosphere or “corona” could be due to the intriguing behavior of small-scale waves in this nebulous plasma. These waves, known to scientists as “kinetic Alfvén waves” or “KAWs,” are wave-like vibrations of magnetic fields manifested by motions in the sun’s photosphere. The findings could provide an important clue to decoding the…

On Tuesday (July 23), Europe’s Solar Orbiter (SolO) spacecraft witnessed an extremely powerful X14 class solar flare erupt from the far side of the sun. Although it was not the most powerful flare ever recorded, which was estimated at roughly a X45 back in 2003, solar flares of this magnitude can result in longer-lived radiation storms and even world-wide blackouts if they are directed at Earth. The X-class are the leaders on the classification scale, and blast out energy 10 times more powerful than M class flares, which is second…

The sun continues firing off solar flares during what has been a period of intense activity.  Sunspot AR3738 might be making its exit as it rotates out of our view on the sun’s western limb, but not before firing off a powerful X-class solar flare, the strongest of its kind. The solar flare from sunspot AR3738 occurred Tuesday morning (July 16) at 9:26 a.m. EDT (1326 GMT). A shortwave radio blackout in conjunction with the latest event was reported over mostly the Atlantic Ocean and also noted across much of Africa, Europe, and…

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Sarah Spitzer is a research fellow in Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering at the University of Michigan. The sun warms the Earth, making it habitable for people and animals. But that’s not all it does, and it affects a much larger area of space. The heliosphere, the area of space influenced by the sun, is over a hundred times larger than the distance from the sun to the Earth. The sun is a…

May and June 2024 saw the highest sunspot numbers on the sun since 2002, but is the peak of the solar cycle here yet?  The sun follows an 11-year solar cycle of increasing and decreasing activity. Although not the first astronomer to discover the solar cycle, the solar cycle numbering and naming convention was first introduced in 1852 by Swiss astronomer Johann Rudolf Wolf. Within his new solar cycle numbering system, he set the historic 1755-1766 solar cycle ‘Solar Cycle 1’. By the time of his work, the sun was…

Miguel Claro is a professional photographer, author and science communicator based in Lisbon, Portugal, who creates spectacular images of the night sky. As a European Southern Observatory Photo Ambassador and member of The World At Night and the official astrophotographer of the Dark Sky Alqueva Reserve, he specializes in astronomical “Skyscapes” that connect both Earth and the night sky.  This image shows the silhouette of the International Space Station (ISS) as it crosses in front of the sun’s disk at a distance of 274 miles (441.5 km) from us and at a speed of about 4.5 miles…