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Our planet is being bombarded by high-energy particles unleashed by the strongest solar storm since 2005, scientists say.
The charged particles are mostly a concern for satellites - which they can disrupt - and astronauts.
But they can also cause communication problems for aircraft travelling near the poles.
Solar storm's effects to lash Earth until Wednesday, 1/24/12
Stanford physicists probing the sun's deep interior have predicted the emergence of sunspots on the surface a full two days before they appear, providing the first early warning of the violent solar storms that can endanger astronauts in space, disrupt electric power grids on Earth, and plunge cities into darkness.
Stanford scientists find way to predict sunspots, 8/19/11
One of the biggest disasters we face would begin about 18 hours after the sun spit out a 10-billion-ton ball of plasma--something it has done before and is sure to do again. When the ball, a charged cloud of particles called a coronal mass ejection (CME), struck the Earth, electrical currents would spike through the power grid. Transformers would be destroyed. Lights would go out. Food would spoil and--since the entire transportation system would also be shut down--go unrestocked.
Are We Prepared for a Catastrophic Solar Storm?, 6/30/11
Solar Dynamics Observatory, a space telescope charged with watching the sun in unprecedented detail, revealed its first look at the sun to the world one year ago today. Best Sun Images From Solar Space Telescope’s First Year, 4/21/11
Professor Raymond Wheeler, from the University of Kansas, at first almost stumbled into the frightening data. The connection was initially discovered by noted Russian scientist Alexander Chizhevsky during 1915: solar storms trigger conflict, wars and death. A vortex of death.
Solar storms trigger conflict, wars and death, 3/22/11
March 2, 2011: In 2008-2009, sunspots almost completely disappeared for two years. Solar activity dropped to hundred-year lows; Earth's upper atmosphere cooled and collapsed; the sun’s magnetic field weakened, allowing cosmic rays to penetrate the Solar System in record numbers. It was a big event, and solar physicists openly wondered, where have all the sunspots gone?
Now they know. An answer is being published in the March 3rd edition of Nature.
"Plasma currents deep inside the sun interfered with the formation of sunspots and prolonged solar minimum," says lead author Dibyendu Nandi of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Kolkata. "Our conclusions are based on a new computer model of the sun's interior."
Researchers Crack the Mystery of the Missing Sunspots, 3/2/11
Warnings have been voiced for the last two years: the sun is waking up and it could be very destructive.
Recently, the strongest solar flare in four years hit Earth a glancing blow and caused havoc in China, splashed a rare display of the Northern lights over the UK and prompted aviation officials to route planes away from the higher polar regions
The sun is waking from a long quiet period and this go around it may prove to be very, very active
Experts warn US must take space storm threat seriously, 2/21/11
Since last April, 19 cancer patients whose liver tumors hadn’t responded to chemotherapy have taken an experimental drug. Within weeks of the first dose, it appeared to work, by preventing tumors from making proteins they need to survive. The results are preliminary yet encouraging. With a slight redesign, the drug might work for hundreds of diseases, fulfilling the promise that wonder cures like stem cells and gene therapy have failed to deliver.
Huge solar flare jams radio, satellite signals: NASA, 2/17/11
Scientists believe they may have found a new planet in the far reaches of the solar system, up to four times the mass of Jupiter.
Its orbit would be thousands of times further from the Sun than the Earth's - which could explain why it has so far remained undiscovered.
Data which could prove the existence of Tyche, a gas giant in the outer Oort Cloud, is set to be released later this year - although some believe proof has already been garnered by Nasa with its pace telescope, Wise, and is waiting to be pored over.
Largest planet in the solar system could be about to be discovered - and it's up to four times the size of Jupiter, 2/14/11
The Destroyer is most likely a brown dwarf star that’s too cold to be seen and in a perpetual dance with our Sun.
So many people want to label The Destroyer as a planet, or planet x. When NASA tells you that there are no large planets in our solar system that have gone undetected, they are not lying. Any large planet that would be big enough to affect Earth by passing us would have been seen by amature astronomers and would be all over the internet by now.
A brown dwarf star, locked in a binary orbit with our Sun, would be a whole different story. It can only be seen with high power infrared telescopes.
The Destroyer: Our Binary Partner and Why You Will Not See It Coming, 2/6/11
The coming year will be an important one for space weather as the Sun pulls out of a trough of low activity and heads into a long-awaited and possibly destructive period of turbulence
Many people may be surprised to learn that the Sun, rather than burn with faultless consistency, goes through moments of calm and tempest
But two centuries of observing sunspots -- dark, relatively cool marks on the solar face linked to mighty magnetic forces -- have revealed that our star follows a roughly 11-year cycle of behaviour
Forecasters keep eye on looming ‘Solar Max’, 12/29/10
On August 1, 2010, an entire hemisphere of the sun erupted. Filaments of magnetism snapped and exploded, shock waves raced across the stellar surface, billion-ton clouds of hot gas billowed into space. Astronomers knew they had witnessed something big.
It was so big, it may have shattered old ideas about solar activity
"The August 1st event really opened our eyes," says Karel Schrijver of Lockheed Martin's Solar and Astrophysics Lab in Palo Alto, CA. "We see that solar storms can be global events, playing out on scales we scarcely imagined before."
Global Eruption Rocks the Sun 12/13/10
A huge snakelike tendril of magnetic plasma has appeared on the sun, extending hundreds of thousands of miles across the surface of our nearest star.
The solar filament was spotted Tuesday (Nov. 16) by cameras on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which stares at the sun continuously in different wavelengths. It is a mind-boggling 600,000 kilometers (just over 372,800 miles) long, according to the website Spaceweather.com. [Photo of the snakelike sun filament]
Solar filaments are long threads of plasma that rise up into the sun's ultra-hot outer atmosphere, called the corona. These filaments are much cooler than the corona and appear to be dark with the sun's disk in the background. They can form dazzling prominences when viewed along the sun's curving horizon, called the limb.
Huge Magnetic Plasma 'Snake' Spotted On the Sun, 11/21/10
Displaying the intense ferocity of the solar atmosphere this phenomenal big picture shows the sun in a rather unusual way
Aptly entitled, 'Not The Great Pumpkin', it was taken by American amateur astrophotographer Alan Friedman on a small 14 inch telescope.
The image brilliantly displays the atmosphere of the sun, called the chromosphere and it was taken using a special 'hydrogen' filter that only captures a tiny part of the visible light spectrum.
Sun spots many times the size of the Earth can be clearly seen within the churning plasma that swirls across the superheated surface of our nearest star.
Incredible new image of the sun's atmosphere caught on camera by amateur astronomer, 11/2/10
The Sun isn't kind to objects without atmospheres. Bombarded by solar radiation, the surfaces of some comets, for example, tend to be a charred carbon-black. But the 1,000 objects so far directly imaged in the Kuiper Belt - that swath of icy bodies circling around the Sun with Pluto - appear to be a wide range of colors: red, blue, and white.
With scant observations to go on - most of the Kuiper belt objects are just a single pixel of light to the Hubble Space Telescope - few hypotheses have been developed to explain the colors. But a new computer model maps out the right combination of materials and space environment that could produce some of those lovely hues.
Kuiper Belt Of Many Colors, 10/28/10
NASA is preparing a flurry of new spacecraft launches, planetary flybys and orbital insertions in the next two years, and is celebrating the “Year of the Solar System” to mark the occasion. Twenty-three months is actually a Martian year, so hey, it works.
The space agency has dozens of missions at any given time, and scientists are always maneuvering some spacecraft into a new orbit or into a new trajectory. But the next two years will see triple the usual amount of activity, NASA says. The second half of 2011 will be as busy, space-wise, as entire decades of the space age, according to Jim Green, NASA’s planetary science director
Celebrating a Flurry of Activity, NASA Dubs Next 23 Months the "Year Of the Solar System, 10/08/10
When probing the deepest reaches of the Cosmos or magnifying our understanding of the quantum world, a whole host of mysteries present themselves. This is to be expected when pushing our knowledge of the Universe to the limit.
But what if a well-known -- and apparently constant -- characteristic of matter starts behaving mysteriously?
This is exactly what has been noticed in recent years; the decay rates of radioactive elements are changing. This is especially mysterious as we are talking about elements with "constant" decay rates -- these values aren't supposed to change. School textbooks teach us this from an early age.
Is the Sun Emitting a Mystery Particle?, 8/25/10
Researchers at Big Bear Solar Observatory have tuned their adaptive optics array and achieved first light, capturing this image of a sunspot that is now the most detailed ever captured in visible light. The image was captured with Big Bear’s New Solar Telescope (NST), a brand new instrument (as the name implies) with a resolution of just 50 miles on the sun’s surface.
The NST is the precursor to an even-larger telescope, the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST), which will be constructed over the next decade, allowing Big Bear researchers to build a new kind of adaptive optics system known as multi-conjugate adaptive optics, that should provide them with a clear, distortion-free means of observing the sun from Earth in unrivaled detail.
Big Bear Solar Observatory Snaps the Most Detailed Pic of a Sunspot Ever, 8/24/10
Earth and space are about to come into contact in a way that's new to human history. To make preparations, authorities in Washington DC are holding a meeting: The Space Weather Enterprise Forum at the National Press Club on June 8th.
"The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity. At the same time, our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms. The intersection of these two issues is what we're getting together to discuss."
As the Sun Awakens, NASA Keeps a Wary Eye on Space Weather, 6/4/10
Jem Melts Rock Using Sunshine - Bang Goes The Theory - Series 3, Episode 5...
Jem Melts Rock Using Sunshine - Bang Goes The Theory"
Pagan Origin of Sunday
Sunday and Pagan Sun Worship
Pagan Sun Worship in 3d & 4th Century
Pagan Sun Worship—Mithraism & Power of Mithras Cult
Pagan Sun’s Day
Sun Worship and Semi-Pagan Manichaean
Anglican Archbishop Declares Tradition as Its Origin
Part of Church’s Policy of Adopting Pagan Festivals
A Human Ordinance
Sun Worship
Sun worship can be traced back to the earliest civilizations known to man. In Mesopotamia, the Sumerians believed all gods and goddesses, including the sun god named Utu, were celestial beings that radiated a bright light. Ancient Egyptians believed the sun was a manifestation of God, which they called Ra. Egyptians believed that Ra created the first divine couple, Shu and Tefnut, who were the parents of the earth and sky.
In ancient Greece, Helios, the god of the sun, was said to rise from the ocean in the east each morning and ride in his chariot across the sky each day to descend at night in the west.
Although these beliefs no longer hold true, there is a small, but growing number of present-day sun worshipers who still look to the sun as a powerful object in the sky. But instead of worshipping it as if it were a god, they're working hard to harness its energy and create a vibrant and affordable photovoltaics market. This is a group of people we should all respect — it's because of their hard work and undying commitment that this market still even exists.
Sun Worshipers Unite!
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