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sun

WHAT IF: The Sun Exploded… Soon?

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Supernova - Deposit Photos

Every Wednesday, we’re asking a what-if question – how would our world be different if something were changed? Today’s question is from QSFer Scott: Scientists say we have about five billion years before the sun is likely to explode. But what if we found out it was happening in the next 12-24 months? Share your serious scientific analyses, your off-color jokes, and random thoughts on the topic on our FB and MeWe Groups: FB: http://bit.ly/1MvPABV MeWe: http://bit.ly/2mjg8lf

WHAT IF: A Solar Storm Destroyed the Internet?

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Solar Storm - NASA

The sun is always showering Earth with a mist of magnetized particles known as solar wind. For the most part, our planet’s magnetic shield blocks this electric wind from doing any real damage to Earth or its inhabitants, instead sending those particles skittering toward the poles and leaving behind a pleasant aurora in their wake. But sometimes, every century or so, that wind escalates into a full-blown solar storm — and, as new research presented at the SIGCOMM 2021 data communication conference warns, the results of such extreme space weather could be catastrophic to our modern way of life. In … Read more

What If the Sun Were Destroyed?

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Supernova - Pixabay

Every Wednesday, we’re asking a what-if question – how would our world be different if something were changed? Today’s question is from QSFer Scott: What if the sun were destroyed? Could there still be life in the solar system? From Live Science Share your serious scientific analyses, your off-color jokes, and random thoughts on the topic on our FB and MeWe Groups: FB: http://bit.ly/1MvPABV MeWe: http://bit.ly/2mjg8lf

What Happens After the Sun Dies?

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supernova - pixabay

Our sun’s death is a long way off — about 4.5 billion years, give or take — but someday it’s going to happen, and what then for our solar system? The trouble begins before the death proper: The first thing we have to contend with is the elderly sun itself. As the fusion of hydrogen continues inside the sun, the result of that reaction — helium — builds up in the core. With all the waste product hanging around, it gets harder for the sun to do its fusion dance. But the inward crushing weight of the sun’s atmosphere doesn’t … Read more

If the Moon is Made of Cheese, the Sun is Made of Popcorn

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sun magnetic fields

Need a little more sun in your life? German scientists have just finished upgrading a solar telescope called GREGOR at the Teide Observatory in the Canary Islands, and the result is a spectacular new set of images of our star. “This was a very exciting, but also extremely challenging project,” Lucia Kleint, a scientist at the Leibniz Institute for Solar Physics in Freiburg, Germany and lead researcher on the project, said in a statement. “In only one year we completely redesigned the optics, mechanics and electronics to achieve the best possible image quality.” Full Story From Live Science 

SPACE: Does the Sun Have a Long-Lost Twin?

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binary stars - European Space Agency

The most distant region of our solar system, a sphere of dark, icy debris out beyond Neptune, is too crowded. All that stuff out there, beyond the reach of the ancient disk of gas and dust that formed the planets, doesn’t match with scientific models of how the solar system formed. Now, a pair of researchers has offered a new take on this far-out mystery: Our sun has a long-lost twin. And the two stars spent their childhoods collecting the passing debris from interstellar space, crowding the outer reaches of the solar system. We can’t see this twin. Wherever it … Read more

Water Bears On the Sun!

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Solar Tardigrade - ESA

Regular followers of the QSF blog know we have a soft spot for tardigrades – also called “water bears,” and we live for space news. So we HAD to share this one with you! From Live Science: No, tardigrades haven’t colonized the sun. But a tardigrade-shaped speck on a solar mission’s images recently led to some joking about the unlikely solar presence of a wee water bear. Today (July 16), when the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA unveiled the latest images captured by the agencies’ Solar Orbiter mission, some sharp-eyed viewers were quick to point out a small, dark blotch on … Read more

SPACE: The Sun is Belching at Us

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solar burps

The sun’s corona constantly breathes wispy strings of hot, charged particles into space — a phenomenon we call the solar wind. Every now and then, however, those breaths become full-blown burps. Perhaps as often as once every hour or two, according to a study in the February issue of the journal JGR: Space Physics, the plasma underlying the solar wind grows significantly hotter, becomes noticeably denser, and it pops out of the sun in rapid-fire orbs of goo capable of engulfing entire planets for minutes or hours at a time. Officially, these solar burps are called periodic density structures, but … Read more

SPACE: The Earth is Basically a Mini Sun

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Our sun is a lifeless, fiery ball of gas fueled by a nuclear inferno. Earth, meanwhile, is a rocky, layered planet covered by water and teeming with life. Nevertheless, the elemental composition of these two celestial bodies is surprisingly similar. The elements in the sun and Earth are pretty much the same, though Earth had less of the sun’s more volatile elements, which evaporate at high temperatures, a new analysis reveals. This suggests that Earth formed from material in the solar nebula — the cloud of dust and gas that shaped the sun — but volatile elements such as helium, … Read more

SCIENCE: A Giant Solar Storm Could Knock Out Earth’s Electic Grid

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A gigantic solar storm hit Earth about 2,600 years ago, one about 10 times stronger than any solar storm recorded in the modern day, a new study finds. These findings suggest that such explosions recur regularly in Earth’s history, and could wreak havoc if they were to hit now, given how dependent the world has become on electricity. The sun can bombard Earth with explosions of highly energetic particles known as solar proton events. These “proton storms” can endanger people and electronics both in space and in the air. In addition, when a proton storm hits Earth’s magnetosphere — the … Read more