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Solar Flare Bursts Into Fiery Rain Over The Sun
On the 19th of July a solar flare burst from the surface of the sun. Instead of dispersing, the hot plasma became trapped in the magnetic field emanating from the region of the eruption. Normally invisible to the naked eye, the lines of the magnetic field lit up as it captured the flare and forced it back down to the solar surface in a dazzling phenomenon known as a coronal rain.
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posted 21 February, 2013
by cranberryzero - reblogged from mildlyamused
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Just for fun, scientists vaporize the Earth in a simulation
One day, a long long long time from now, the Sun will expand to many times its current size, engulfing the inner planets, including our own Earth, vaporizing our atmosphere and rocks and trees and cute baby deer. What will that look like? Some astronomers at Washington University St. Louis decided to find out.
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posted 20 September, 2012
by cranberryzero - 25 notes for this post
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This massive solar eruption could have melted all of our faces off
This “long filament of solar material,” as NASA calls it, was spotted tearing away from the Sun at upwards of 900 miles per second. Yes, per second; this CME, as is typical of super-hot plasma filaments that are flung from the sun, was hauling serious ass. It was also freaking enormous — plenty big enough to wrap itself around the Earth a few times — not to mention a few other planets — and still have some plasma left over.
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posted 10 September, 2012
by cranberryzero - 7 notes for this post
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So apparently, we were wrong about the shape of the sun until just a few days ago
For all of modern astronomy, we were pretty damn certain about the shape of the sun. It’s a giant ball of hot plasma and gas and magnetism, so it made sense that in test after test, it was an ever-changing, wobbly undulating thing, where the exact shape was never the same. But we were wrong. It’s a near perfect sphere, slightly flat near the poles, but otherwise almost perfectly round.
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posted 18 August, 2012
by cranberryzero - 46 notes for this post
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Transit of Venus. No need to look elsewhere.
So beautiful.
Yesterday, the Sun had a 79,000 mile wide sungasm
You may not have noticed, but yesterday, the Sun had a massive coronal mass ejection, erupting some 198,000 miles off the surface and 79,000 miles wide. That’s big enough to fit ten Earths under.
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posted 17 April, 2012
by cranberryzero - 618 notes for this post
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Watch a giant, Earth-sized tornado moving across the surface of the Sun
So I guess we’re not in Kansas any more…
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posted 19 February, 2012
by zeitgeyser - 24 notes for this post
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Comet Lovejoy somehow survived going through the Sun to come out the other side
Normally, when anything crashes into a star, you can pretty much hang it up for that whatever it is. So when astronomers saw a comet named Lovejoy plunge into the Sun’s corona, the assumption was that was the end of the comet.. until the comet came out the other side of the Sun. A giant furnace, where even atoms are stripped down to their base components and yet somehow a comet survived.
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posted 17 December, 2011
by cranberryzero - 35 notes for this post
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Massive solar flare possibly on its way. Is it going to hit Earth? Eh, who knows?
First off, to be clear, solar flares do not pose any threat to life on Earth. However, a massive solar flare could, and has, disrupted communications by knocking out or disorienting satellites. But ahead of the solar maximum in 2013 or 2014, sun-watchers have been observing the build-up of what could be an incredibly massive flare that could be headed our way.
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posted 14 November, 2011
by cranberryzero - 13 notes for this post
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Bigfoot spotted strutting across the surface of the Sun
Wow, this sasquatch conspiracy is way bigger than anyone ever imagined. May I be the first to bow down to our new plasma bigfoot overlords.
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posted 09 October, 2011
by cranberryzero - 42 notes for this post
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The most awesome picture of the Sun you’ll see today
This is from NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory satellite and it says it’s a composite image, but it doesn’t fucking say what wavelengths it’s a composite of. Am I missing something? That seems like helpful information.
Link to lots more photos of the Sun that don’t specify what wavelength they’re taken at
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posted 29 September, 2011
by cranberryzero - 28 notes for this post
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How big are solar flares? Answer: Really fucking big.
You may know that solar flares are pretty big, but this video really puts things in perspective.
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posted 04 September, 2011
by cranberryzero - 20 notes for this post
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This is what it looks like when a solar storm engulfs the Earth
Solar storms hit the Earth on a fairly regular basis, but here on terra firma, we can’t really see them when we’re in the middle of them. But now with the STEREO probe way out in space studying the Sun, it was able to turn its eye back onto the Earth to watch our tiny blue dot get completely engulfed in a massive solar storm.
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posted 18 August, 2011
by cranberryzero - 1 note for this post
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Why is the Earth slowly moving away from the Sun?
Over the last century, we’ve been able to use all sorts of modern technology like “lasers” to very precisely measure the distance from the Earth to the Sun, also known as one astronomical unit (AU). And in measuring this distance precisely, we’ve noticed something very strange— the Earth and the Sun are moving away from each other very very slowly, at the rate of about 15 cm per year. But why?
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posted 15 August, 2011
by cranberryzero - 10 notes for this post
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While you were doing whatever it is you people do, the Sun sharted out a massive solar flare today
While this isn’t the biggest solar flare this year (that happened back in February), the solar flare that happened today was, as Phil Plait on Bad Astronomy called, “ginormous”, which I believe is a technical term.
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posted 07 June, 2011
by cranberryzero - 7 notes for this post
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