SWEAP Investigation Will Directly Measure Ionized Gas in the Solar Atmosphere
When NASA’s Parker Solar Probe launches into space from the Kennedy Space Center, it will begin its journey to the Sun, our nearest star. The…
Sun
Ancient Blue Crystals Reveal What the Early Sun Was Like
Our Sun’s beginnings are a mystery. It burst into being 4.6 billion years ago, about 50 million years before the Earth formed. Since the Sun…
Parker Solar Probe Will Face Several-Million-Degree Fahrenheit Temperatures
This summer, humanity embarks on its first mission to touch the Sun: A spacecraft will be launched into the Sun’s outer atmosphere. Facing several-million-degree Fahrenheit…
Something Mysterious is Going on at the Sun – The Curious Case of the Hot Corona
Something mysterious is going on at the Sun. In defiance of all logic, its atmosphere gets much, much hotter the farther it stretches from the…
Solar and Heliospheric Observatory Captures the Sounds of the Sun
Data from ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has captured the dynamic movement of the Sun’s atmosphere for over 20…
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Prepares to Travel to the Sun
This summer, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will launch to travel closer to the Sun, deeper into the solar atmosphere, than any mission before it. If…
Astronomers Reveal Fine-Grained Structures in the Sun’s Outer Corona
In 1610, Galileo redesigned the telescope and discovered Jupiter’s four largest moons. Nearly 400 years later, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope used its powerful optics to…
High Resolution Coronal Imager Launches to Study Sun’s Corona
NASA and its partners launched a rocket-borne camera to the edge of space at 2:54 p.m. EDT May 29, 2018, on its third flight to…
Two New Missions Will Go Closer to Our Sun Than Ever Before
As we develop more and more powerful tools to peer beyond our solar system, we learn more about the seemingly endless sea of faraway stars…
Scientists Discover Gigantic Solar Rossby Waves on the Sun
A team of scientists led by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and the University of Göttingen has discovered gigantic swirls on the…
Physicists Discover Previously Undetected Energy in the Sun’s Coronal Loops
A team of physicists, including NJIT’s Gregory Fleishman, has discovered previously undetected energy in the Sun’s coronal loops. The Sun’s corona, invisible to the human…
Astronomers Predict What Will Happen When Our Sun Dies
Scientists agree the sun will die in approximately 10 billion years, but they weren’t sure what would happen next…until now. A team of international astronomers,…
SDO Views Our Sun In Three Different Wavelengths
From March 20-23, 2018, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured three sequences of our Sun in three different extreme ultraviolet wavelengths. The resulting images illustrate how…
NASA Satellites Recreate Solar CME Eruption in 3D
The more solar observatories, the merrier: Scientists have developed new models to see how shocks associated with coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, propagate from the…
Physicists Solve 70-Year-Old Magnetic Wave Mystery
Scientists at Queen’s University Belfast have led an international team to the ground-breaking discovery that magnetic waves crashing through the Sun may be key to…
Space Weather Satellite Set to Go Where No Mission Has Gone Before
Living near a star is risky business, and positioning a spacecraft near the Sun is a very good way to observe rapidly changing solar activity…
Astronomers Reveal How a Magnetic Cage Stopped a Solar Eruption
A dramatic magnetic power struggle at the Sun’s surface lies at the heart of solar eruptions, new research using NASA data shows. The work highlights…
New Simulations of Magnetic Reconnection in the Sun
The Sun glows with a surface temperature of about 5500 degrees Celsius. On the other hand its hot outer layer, the corona, has a temperature…