An unexpectedly strong blast from the Sun hit Mars this month, observed by NASA missions in orbit and on the surface.
Space Exploration
Sep 30, 2017
3
571
Could the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Costa Rica set off a hurricane in California? The question has been scrutinized by chaos theorists, stock-market analysts and weather forecasters for decades. For most people, ...
Space Exploration
Sep 19, 2017
2
298
The sun's largest solar flare in more than 12 years – and the eighth largest since modern records began in 1996 – has been captured in high detail by a team of researchers from the University of Sheffield and Queen's ...
Space Exploration
Sep 11, 2017
1
1249
On July 5, 2017, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory watched an active region—an area of intense and complex magnetic fields—rotate into view on the Sun. The satellite continued to track the region as it grew and eventually ...
Space Exploration
Aug 4, 2017
0
129
A team of astronomers, led by PhD researcher Malcolm Druett of Northumbria University at Newcastle, have taken a big step forward in understanding a 30-year-old mystery in the process of formation of solar flares. Druett ...
Space Exploration
Jul 4, 2017
0
55
New models of massive stellar eruptions hint at an extra layer of complexity when considering whether an exoplanet may be habitable or not. Models developed for our own Sun have now been applied to cool stars favoured by ...
Astronomy
Jul 3, 2017
3
466
Long-term power cuts, destruction of electronic devices and increased cancer risk for aeroplane passengers are all potential effects of the Earth being hit by a powerful solar eruption.
Space Exploration
Jun 23, 2017
6
490
Our ever-changing sun continuously shoots solar material into space. The grandest such events are massive clouds that erupt from the sun, called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs. These solar storms often come first with some ...
Space Exploration
May 8, 2017
0
521
New research on solar storms finds that they not only can cause regions of excessive electrical charge in the upper atmosphere above Earth's poles, they also can do the exact opposite: cause regions that are nearly depleted ...
Space Exploration
Apr 11, 2017
6
419
Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Earth (only 4.28 light-years away) is getting a lot of attention these days. It hosts a planet, Proxima Cen b, whose mass is about 1.3 Earth-mass (though it could be larger, depending ...
Astronomy
Apr 3, 2017
4
389
