SDO sees a dark filament circle

A dark, almost circular filament broke away from the sun in a gauzy, feathery swirl, on Nov. 15, 2015, in this video from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. This filament eruption was followed by a second filament breaking ...

Subaru Telescope observes rapid changes in a comet's plasma tail

Images from a December 2013 observation of the comet C/2013 R1 (Lovejoy) reveal clear details about rapidly changing activity in that comet's plasma tail. To get this image, astronomers used Subaru Telescope's wide-field ...

Origin of 'theta aurora'—long-standing space mystery—revealed

Auroras are the most visible manifestation of the sun's effect on Earth, but many aspects of these spectacular displays are still poorly understood. Thanks to the joint European Space Agency and NASA's Cluster mission combined ...

The dark fingers of the solar atmosphere

The Sun is bubbling, forming mysterious finger-like plasma structures in its gaseous envelope, the corona. A German-American team headed by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research has now succeeded in explaining ...

Rosetta's comet sings strange, seductive song

Scientists can't figure exactly why yet, but Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has been singing since at least August. Listen to the video – what do you think? I hear a patter that sounds like frogs, purring and ping-pong ...

Tiny "nanoflares" might heat the Sun's corona

Why is the Sun's million-degree corona, or outermost atmosphere, so much hotter than the Sun's surface? This question has baffled astronomers for decades. Today, a team led by Paola Testa of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center ...

page 9 from 15