All articles tagged with #sun
Light from the Sun reaches Earth in about eight minutes, but the energy that becomes sunlight spends roughly 170,000 years diffusing through the Sun’s dense interior via countless absorptions and re-emissions. The 500,000-year figure is not supported by peer‑reviewed sources. After escaping the photosphere, photons traverse space to Earth in about eight minutes.
Baltimore enjoys a sunny day for storm cleanup, but more rain is forecast for tomorrow. The pattern then shifts to cooler, more pleasant conditions midweek with a mix of sun and scattered showers, and daytime highs generally in the 70s to 80s throughout the week.
New observations and simulations suggest that sun‑like stars, including our Sun, undergo a magnetic‑crisis in mid‑life: their global magnetic field weakens as dynamos slow and may shift from complex to simpler configurations before possibly reviving later. This impacts how stars spin, the space weather they produce, and the habitability of surrounding planets; researchers debate whether the field is truly collapsing or entering a temporary minimum, with implications for interpreting exoplanet biosignatures as NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory searches for life‑bearing worlds.
A Washington Post meteorologist explains the painstaking process of photographing the sun’s corona during a total solar eclipse, detailing his Spain-based prep and a multi-exposure composite that captures coronal loops and prominences while preserving a lifelike view.
New high-resolution images from the NSF’s Inouye Solar Telescope show 20-km-wide plasma vortices at the edges of magnetic flux on the Sun’s surface, caused by Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. These swirling motions could braid magnetic fields and help channel energy from the surface into the corona, offering a potential piece of the coronal-heating puzzle, but the authors caution they have not quantified the energy contribution and call for independent confirmation with even more powerful instruments.
New findings from India's Aditya-L1 mission show the Sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, is heated mainly by magnetic-field-line reconnection (≈93%), with surface waves contributing about 7%. By analyzing a highly energetic CME on 5 August 2024, scientists quantified energy replenishment and confirmed the corona remains exceptionally hot despite repeated eruptions; the results, published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, provide a key benchmark for solar physics.
Scientists using the NSF Inouye Solar Telescope captured the sun’s sharpest-ever surface image, revealing intricate swirl patterns at the edges of magnetic regions that indicate Kelvin-Helmholtz instability; the findings, published in Nature, mark a major advance in understanding solar and stellar plasma dynamics.
A controversial thought experiment outlines a hyper-ambitious plan to keep Earth's habitability as the Sun expands: deploy a gigantic sunshade at the L1 point to block sunlight, power it with lasers from fusion reactors in Jupiter's atmosphere, use asteroid slingshots to move Earth outward, and even propose antimatter injections and future solar-system maneuvers to dodge Andromeda—claims it could extend life for 9.1 million billion years, but it is presented as speculative and not a practical blueprint.
SpaceWeather.com reports an Earth-directed CME from two solar filament eruptions with an ETA around Aug 11–12, potentially triggering auroras near the Perseid meteor shower, while a moderate G2 geomagnetic storm is already in progress as Earth sits in the CME wake. Separately, Comet 220P/McNaught underwent dramatic outbursts, brightening to binocular visibility with observers noting a shock-wave-like debris shell; the page also features aurora imagery and various sky-watching updates.
Ultra-detailed images from the Inouye Solar Telescope show Kelvin-Helmholtz swirl patterns in the Sun’s magnetic field, with vortices about 50–65 kilometers apart. These twisting motions transfer and concentrate magnetic energy, potentially fueling solar eruptions such as flares and coronal mass ejections, which can affect space weather and threaten power grids and satellites.
APOD's Aug 9, 2026 feature shows a Sun partially eclipsed by the Moon (with visible sunspots) captured in 2012 near Page, Arizona. It notes an upcoming solar eclipse sweeping northern North America, Europe, and northwestern Africa, with totality along a Greenland-to-Portugal path, and a chance for Perseid meteors during totality.
Scientists using the Daniel Inouye Solar Telescope on Haleakalā captured high‑resolution images of the Sun’s surface, revealing small plasma vortices formed by Kelvin‑Helmholtz Instability. These vortices help drive magnetic field mixing and heat transport toward the Sun’s outer atmosphere, offering new insights into solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and why the Sun’s atmosphere is hotter than its surface.
ScienceAlert's This Week in Science rounds up: a FIU-led study finds some people attract more mosquitoes due to skin scents and microbes; the Sun’s surface is revealed in unprecedented detail with swirling vortices; researchers identify bacteria behind the 'farm effect' on immunity; humans are a predator even bears and mountain lions fear; GLP-1 drugs may lower the risk of age-related macular degeneration; and a review suggests ancient feces helped kickstart the evolution of complex life.
The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope captured the sharpest visible-light image of the Sun to date, revealing tiny plasma vortices formed by Kelvin-Helmholtz instability on the Sun’s surface and confirming a long-predicted phenomenon, with implications for solar energy transfer to the corona and space weather.
Researchers using the 4‑meter Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope imaged Kelvin‑Helmholtz vortexes at 416 nm on the Sun’s surface, showing 60–100 km spacing and 25–170 km-diameter structures that can grow quickly and travel 0.67–3 km/s. The observations, aided by high-speed imaging and advanced deconvolution, suggest a new mechanism for heat, mass, and magnetic-energy transport in the solar atmosphere and may affect convection and corona heating models. The study combines telescope data with simulations to confirm the effect, but is based on a short (about 3 minutes) observation window and calls for longer, magnetic-field–map measurements to fully quantify energy budgets.