The Sun Is Coming!

Earth got off relatively easy last week after being hit by the biggest blast of solar radiation since 2005—but we may not be so lucky next time. Last week’s coronal mass ejection, in which a solar flare whipped an arc of magnetic particles toward Earth at 4 million mph, led some airlines to reroute flights away from the poles, where […]

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Black Hole Discovered

Black Hole Discovered

A black hole when found in the center of the Milky Way would appear to be 10 times brighter than our full moon.  Scientists estimate that its light would have formed about 12 billion years ago and would have measured about as big as 20 billion suns.  The energy that comes from a black hole is mostly ultraviolet light.  Astronomers […]

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Mission to the Sun

Mission to the Sun

Since NASA has made missions to the moon, Mars, and Pluto they are now getting ready to mission to the sun.  This spacecraft will come within four million miles from the sun’s surface to explore its atmosphere and observe how this star works.  The probe called Solar Probe Plus will have a shield on it so that it can survive […]

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Solar storm blasts Earth

The largest solar storm since 2005 swept across the planet this week, forcing airlines to reroute flights and disrupting communications from global positioning satellites. This spontaneous blast of solar radiation may have affected power grids and high-frequency radio communications in the northern latitudes, said the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center. A number of airlines, which route some U.S.-Asia flights over […]

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The Missing Heat – Global warming hits plateau

The Missing Heat - Global warming hits plateau

Global warming hits plateau. . . What does that mean for the threat of catastrophic climate change? Why has the warming trend slowed? Climatologists aren’t sure. What they do know is that the average air temperatures at the earth’s surface have risen only about 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1998—the hottest year of the 20th century—even as humanity has continued to […]

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Our sun’s hotter sister

Stars are not born alone. Rather, they emerge from clouds of gas and dust in groups of up to 10,000, then slowly scatter through space. For the first time, astronomers have identified a star that came from the same solar nursery as our sun, some 4.5 billion years ago. This stellar relative—located 110 light-years away in the constellation Hercules—is hotter […]

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