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Explanation: A long solar filament stretches across the relatively calm surface of the Sun in this telescopic snap shot from April 27. The negative or inverted narrowband image was made in the light of ionized hydrogen atoms. Seen at the upper left, the magnificent curtain of magnetized plasma towers above surface and actually reaches beyond the Sun's edge. How long is the solar filament? About as long as the distance from Earth to Moon, illustrated by the scale insert at the left. Tracking toward the right across the solar disk a day later the long filament erupted, lifting away from...

A long-sealed tunnel has been found under the ruins of this ancient city, and chambers that seem to branch off it may hold the tombs of some of the city's early rulers, archaeologists said Tuesday. Experts say the social structure of Teotihuacan remains a mystery after nearly 100 years of exploration at the site, best known for the towering Pyramids of the Moon and the Sun.

Explanation: Would you go to the end of the world to see a total eclipse of the Sun? If you did, would you be surprised to find someone else there already? In 2003, the Sun, the Moon, Antarctica, and two photographers all lined up in Antarctica during an unusual total solar eclipse. Even given the extreme location, a group of enthusiastic eclipse chasers ventured near the bottom of the world to experience the surreal momentary disappearance of the Sun behind the Moon. One of the treasures collected was the above picture -- a composite of four separate images digitally combined...

If you've read your share of sci-fi, and I know you have, you've read stories about another Earth-sized planet orbiting on the other side of the Solar System, blocked by the Sun. Could it really be there? =========================================================== Color illustration showing the scale of planets in our solar system, focusing on Jupiter and Saturn. Credit: NASA =========================================================== No. Nooooo. No. Just no. This is a delightful staple in science fiction. There's a mysterious world that orbits the Sun exactly the same distance as Earth, but it's directly across the Solar System from us; always hidden by the Sun. Little do...

Explanation: From January 11 to February 25 2013, a pinhole camera sat in a field near Budapest, Hungary, planet Earth to create this intriguing solargraph. And for 45 days, an old Antonov An-2 biplane stood still while the Sun rose and set. The camera's continuous exposure began about 20 days after the northern hemispere's winter solstice, so each day the Sun's trail arcs steadily higher through the sky. These days in the Sun were recorded on a piece of black and white photosensitive paper tucked in to the simple plastic film container. The long exposure produced a visible color image...

<p>The latest cold snap has almost all of Lake Erie covered by ice.</p> <p>The Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory says ice has formed across close to 94 percent of the lake. That's the highest percentage out of all of the Great Lakes.</p>

The conceit that human production of carbon dioxide is capable of driving the earth’s climate is running smack into the sun. CO2 accounts for a mere 0.039% of the atmosphere, while the sun accounts for 99.86% of all of the mass in our entire solar system. And Ol’ Sol is not taking the insult lightly. Vencore Weather reports: For the past 5 days, solar activity has been very low and one measure of solar activity – its X-ray output – has basically flatlined in recent days (plot below courtesy NOAA/Space Weather Prediction Center). Not since cycle 14 peaked in February...

A Saudi cleric is garnering headlines for declaring that the sun revolves around the Earth, a clear rejection of all scientific evidence. {snip} The controversial cleric, Sheikh Bandar al-Khaibari, was caught making the comments in a short video clip posted to YouTube on Monday. In response to a question posed by a student, al-Khaibari says the Earth is “stationary and does not move.” While al-Khaibari’s remarks have been mocked on social networking sites such as Twitter, regional experts say his anti-science stance is embraced and promoted by leading Saudi clerics in charge of the country’s religious authority. “It makes perfect...

Explanation: On another Valentine's Day 25 years ago, cruising four billion miles from the Sun, the Voyager 1 spacecraft looked back one last time to make this first ever Solar System family portrait. The complete portrait is a 60 frame mosaic made from a vantage point 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane. In it, Voyager's wide angle camera frames sweep through the inner Solar System at the left, linking up with gas giant Neptune, the Solar System's outermost planet, at the far right. Positions for Venus, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are indicated by letters, while the Sun is...

Stars Passing Close to the Sunby Paul Gilster on January 2, 2015 Every time I mention stellar distances I’m forced to remind myself that the cosmos is anything but static. Barnard’s Star, for instance, is roughly six light years away, a red dwarf that was the target of the original Daedalus starship designers back in the 1970s. But that distance is changing. If we were a species with a longer lifetime, we could wait about eight thousand years, at which time Barnard’s Star would close to less than four light years. No star shows a larger proper motion relative to...

The huge solar flare registered as an X1.8-class event, one of the most powerful types of flares possible, and was captured on camera by NASA's powerful Solar Dynamics Observatory. The flare triggered a strong radio blackout for parts of Earth as it peaked Friday at 7:28 p.m. EST (0028 Dec. 20 GMT), according to an alert from the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center overseen by NOAA.

Monica Bobra, Scientific American December 16, 2014A couple of months ago, the sun sported the largest sunspot we've seen in the last 24 years. This monstrous spot, visible to the naked eye (that is, without magnification, but with protective eyewear of course), launched more than 100 flares. The number of the spots on the sun ebbs and flows cyclically, every 11 years. Right now, the sun is in the most active part of this cycle: we're expecting lots of spots and lots of flares in the coming months. Usually, the media focuses on the destructive power of solar flares —...

The new Congress must take whatever action it can to reverse and stop the harm that it represents; people’s jobs and lives depend on it. The intense cold that many Americans are encountering arrives more than a month before the official start of winter on December 2l. To discuss this, we need to keep in mind that weather is what is occurring now. Climate is measured over longer periods, the minimum of which is thirty years and, beyond that, centuries. We are colder these days because the Earth has been in a cooling cycle for 19 years and that cycle...

During the past 48 hours, monster sunspot AR2192 has unleashed seven M-class solar flares. The most powerful of the bunch (Oct 22nd at 0159 UT) was an M9-class eruption that almost crossed the threshold into X-territory. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the extreme ultraviolet flash. UV radiation from the flare ionized Earth's upper atmosphere, causing a brief blackout of HF radio communications on the dayside of Earth (e.g., parts of Asia and Australia). In addition, the explosion might have hurled a CME into space. Confirmation awaits the arrival of coronagraph data from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). Stay tuned...

Hot on the heels of the Lewis and Curry paper, we have this new paper, which looks to be well researched, empirically based, and a potential blockbuster for dimming the alarmism that has been so prevalent over climate sensitivity. With a climate sensitivity of just 0.43°C, it takes the air out of the alarmism balloon. The Hockey Schtick writes: A new paper published in the Open Journal of Atmospheric and Climate Change by renowned professor of physics and expert on spectroscopy Dr. Hermann Harde finds that climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 levels is only about [0.6C], about 7...

US agency faces questions after records show Lulzsec leader Hector Monsegur, who was informant at time, helped attack that closed UK sites The FBI is facing questions over its role in a 2011 hacking attack on Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper in the UK after the publication of chat logs showed that a man acting as an agency informant played a substantial role in the operation. chat records show Monsegur encouraging others to break further into News International systems, claiming to have sources at the Sun, and even apparently helping to break staff’s passwords and to source files for stealing. Monsegur...

It's no surprise that water was crucial to the formation of life on Earth. What may surprise you is that water on earth is older than the sun itself. Identifying the original source of Earth's water is key to understanding how life-fostering environments came into being and how likely they are to be found elsewhere. A new paper in Science says that much of our Solar System's water likely originated as ices that formed in interstellar space. Water is found throughout the Solar System, not just on Earth; on icy comets and moons, and in the shadowed basins of...

North Korea confirms it has landed a man on the Sun North Korea sends a 17-year-old man to the Sun, a journey that took just four hours By: Anthony Garreffa This just in: North Korea has landed a man on the Sun. 17-year-old Hung Il Gong started his journey at 3am this morning, travelling alone, to reach our nearest star, a journey that took him just 4 hours. A North Korean central news anchorman said during a live broadcast: "We are very delighted to announce a successful mission to put a man on the sun. North Korea has beaten every...

Research into global cooling and its implications for the globe is long overdue We may be witnessing the sun’s last dying gasps before entering into a long slumber. The impact of that slumber on Earth’s climate remains the subject of growing scientific speculation. (1) In 2008 William Livingston and Matthew Penn of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, in a controversial paper that contradicted conventional wisdom and upset global warming theorists, predicted that sunspots could more or less disappear after 2015, possibly indicating the onset of another Little Ice Age. They stated, “The occurrence of prolonged periods with no sunspots...

A coronal mass ejection, or CME, surged off the side of the sun on May 9, 2014, and NASA's newest solar observatory caught it in extraordinary detail. This was the first CME observed by the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, which launched in June 2013 to peer into the lowest levels of the sun's atmosphere with better resolution than ever before. Watch the movie to see how a curtain of solar material erupts outward at speeds of 1.5 million miles per hour.