ESA’s Solar Orbiter has successfully completed four months of painstaking technical verification, known as commissioning. Despite the challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the spacecraft…
Moving at eight kilometers (five miles) per second, the International Space Station (ISS) circles our planet every 90 minutes. In a 24-hour period, crew members…
As of June 2020, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory – SDO – has now been watching the Sun non-stop for over a full decade. From its…
Scientists at Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (skoltech), together with colleagues from the Karl-Franzens University of Graz and the Kanzelhoehe Observatory (Austria) developed an…
ESA’s Sun-exploring mission Solar Orbiter has made its first close approach to the star on June 15, getting as close as 77 million kilometers to…
Researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy (IfA) have been hard at work studying the solar corona, the outermost atmosphere of the sun…
200 years of sunspot observations used by University of Warwick researchers to create ‘sun clock’ Sun clock pinpoints times of sharp switch on and off…
Speed as important as size in predicting potentially damaging impacts of coronal mass ejections. Space weather forecasters need to predict the speed of solar eruptions,…
With the development of science and technology, human’s activity was and is expanding from land, sea and sky to the space and other planets. In…
On May 29, 2020, a family of sunspots — dark spots that freckle the face of the Sun, representing areas of complex magnetic fields —…
New analysis published April 29, 2020, in the Astrophysical Journal Letters provides a possible explanation for the origin of switchbacks — sudden reversals in the…
An analysis of 369 solar-like stars shows that solar brightness variations are extremely weak. The extent to which solar activity (and thus the number of…
When a fire extinguisher is opened, the compressed carbon dioxide forms ice crystals around the nozzle, providing a visual example of the physics principle that…
New images from a NASA sounding rocket provide the highest-resolution views ever captured of the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, revealing fine strands of million-degree…
An array of six spacecraft, each about the size of a toaster oven, will help us understand our nearest star and better protect astronauts traveling…
By combining modern data analysis techniques with stellar structure modeling for main-sequence and giant stars, researchers shed new light on stellar dynamos. In their interiors,…
Gray whales 4.3 times more likely to strand during a cosmic burst of radio static. When our sun belches out a hot stream of charged…
In February 2020, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory — SDO — is celebrating its 10th year in space. Over the past decade the spacecraft has kept…