NASA Plans a Probe to the Sun

NASA is sending the Solar Probe Plus spacecraft to within 4 million miles of the sun in 2018. And the agency is taking every precaution to keep the craft from melting.

NASA plans to launch the Solar Probe Plus mission to the sun. Earth is about 93 million miles  from the sun, and Solar Probe Plus is slated to get within 4 million miles of the blazing star. 

For complete article, select HERE

There is a huge hole in the Sun!

There is a huge hole in the Sun!

How big you might query .

Try 50 Earths that's how big.

As scary as a hole 50 Earths might be it is even scarier  because  the  huge  hole  spews  out  a
stream  of  high - speed solar wind, creating a geomagnetic  storm  close  to our own planet.

The image was taken on October 10 in wavelengths of 193 Angstroms, which is invisible to our
eyes. The dark spot, known as a coronal hole, which materialized last week remains harmless to
humans  on Earth but can interfere  with satellite  communications and some high-altitude radio
signals.

Coronal holes appear randomly on the outer layer of the sun, making it look darker than the
rest  of  the  star.   Caused  b y anomalies  in  the sun's  magnetic  field,  th e darker patch is
abundant with colder, less dense, low-energy gas and plasma.

Find complete article HERE

Unique photos of the march Full Solar Eclipse

Wow, now this is what I call an eclipse photo! 

In the Arctic's Svalbard islands  Solar Wind researchers from the University of Hawaii at Manoa  sat up camp in March, in hopes of capturing images of the Sun's corona, or that aura of plasma surrounding the sun.

This close up photo is a composite of 29 separate shots.

Link to Gizmodo article

The Sun WILL eventually Bake the Earth Lifeless

Yes, we have all heard of the scenario where the sun brightens, or even when the sun become a red giant, in either case Earth becomes a cinder of its former self.   This little gem of good news has been postulated as early as 600 million years, based on how fast the sun is brightening, about 1% every 100 million years or so.

But before you invite yourself to the world's biggest fish fry, here is something to consider.  It would seem that the model above was based on incomplete or erroneous information.  The conclusions were based on how  evaporating water and heat would be trapped in the earth's atmosphere, quickly raising the temperature and making life on the surface hellish. 

It would seem though that the model  wasn't complicated enough.  , Recent studies however have  added in cloud coverage and regional temperature differences.  Some studies now estimate that the inevitable will occur closer to 1 billion to 1.5 billion years from now.  It will still happen, but much later than previous studies had suggested. 

The original Popular Science article can be found HERE

Sun Spots

Courtney sends me in this excellent pic of a sunspot.  She goes on to write that it is the clearest photo to day of this phenomenon.  It certainly is a very dramatic photo.  Check it out!

Does the Next Geomagnetic Storm Spell Doom For the U.S.?

From an article in the NY Times written by Kenneth Chang

The worst geomagnetic storm in recorded history happened in 1859.  Sol sent out billions of tons of electrons and protons that slammed into Earth's magnetic fields setting up currents in telegraph wires that shocked the operators and even set nearby paper on fire!

If such a storm hit now in the 21st century, it would have the potential to do much greater harm.   First are the communications and GPS satellites would be damaged or scrambled along with communications and power grids on the surface.  

Millions of people would be affected by a country wide blackout, but according to a non profit company created and funded by the utilities to manage the country's power grids, most of the power could be brought back online in a week.  

Other experts are more pessimistic.  They feel that many components in the grid would be damaged beyond repair.  Some areas would be without power for months while others would experience 

chronic shortages  that would last for years.

These huge storms are impossible to predict and even harder to know if the earth would be in the path.  What is known is that the more sun-spot activity, the more storms.  Such activity has been light so far this season, but this fall the Sun is set to reach the high point of the sun spot 11 year cycle. 

Solar Obseratories Witness and Record a Brilliant Eruption on the Sun

The Coronal Mass Ejection that took place was, if nothing else, exciting and majestic. Here is how NASA says:

• On August 31, 2012 a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun's atmosphere, erupted into space. The ejected mass traveled away from the sun at over 900 miles per second.
• This movie shows the ejection from a variety of viewpoints as captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), and the joint ESA/NASA Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).

Ultraviolet Image of the Sun

From the Dvice.com blog, this photo from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). The article explains that the purplish aura we see is in fact high-arcing loops of 3.6-million-degree plasma that link sunspots and other magnetic areas on the surface. (the white lines are added by a computer to better illustrates the structures across the surface of the Sun.)

From the Wikipedia article on the Solar Dynamics Observatory

• SDO's goal is to understand the Sun's influence on Earth and near-Earth space by studying the solar atmosphere in many wavelengths simultaneously. SDO will investigate how the Sun's magnetic field is generated and structured, how this stored magnetic energy is converted and released into the heliosphere and geospace in the form of solar wind,

All that aside, it's a damn cool pic!

Discover via Dvice

Sol may not be "unusual" for supporting life.

Shaun Saunders send in an article from New Scientist Space which pours a bit of water on the theory that our sun is in some way an optimal star for supporting life on its planets.

There's nothing special about the Sun that makes it more likely than other stars to host life, a new study shows. The finding adds weight to the idea that alien life should be common throughout the universe. Some previous studies of the Sun's vital statistics have concluded that it is unusual among stars, for instance, by having a higher mass than average. Such atypical properties might somehow help explain why the Sun seems to be unique, as far as we know, in having an inhabited planet. But the earlier studies only looked at a small number of solar features, such as its mass and iron content. (Scientists have) now analyzed 11 features of the Sun that might affect its ability to have habitable planets. They included its mass, age, rotation speed and orbital distance from the centre of the Milky Way. The Sun did stand out in two ways: it is more massive than 95% of nearby stars and its orbit around the center of our galaxy is more circular than those of 93% of nearby stars. But when all 11 properties were taken on board, the Sun looked very ordinary. (Scientists) conclude that there are probably no special attributes that a star requires to have a habitable planet, other than the obvious one – the planet must be within the star's habitable "goldilocks" zone, orbiting at a distance where the temperature is not too hot for life, nor too cold, but just right.

(Image: SOHO-EIT Consortium/ESA/NASA)

NASA puts on 3-D glasses to view sun

NASA released the first three-dimensional images of the sun, saying the photos taken from twin spacecraft may lead to better predictions of solar eruptions that can affect communications and power lines on Earth. The images from the STEREO spacecraft (for Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) are available on the Internet. (Put your 3-D glasses on and take a look) The twin spacecraft, launched in October, are orbiting the sun, one slightly ahead of the Earth and one behind. The separation, just like the distance between our two eyes, provides the depth perception that allows the 3-D images to be obtained. That depth perception is also particularly helpful for studying a type of solar eruption called a coronal mass ejection. Along with overloading power lines and disrupting satellite communications, the eruptions can endanger astronauts on spacewalks. The eruptions -- also called solar flares -- typically blow a billion tons of the sun's atmosphere into space at a speed of 1 million miles per hour. Besides power and communications problems, the phenomenon is responsible for the northern lights, or aurora borealis, the luminous display of lights seen in the upper latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.

submitted by Shaun A. Saunders