The Pleistocene Epoch—with its glaciers, woolly mammoths, and Neanderthals—still looms large in Earth’s rearview mirror, having ended a mere 12,000 years ago. Now, a team of researchers posit that those hundreds of thousands of years of our planet’s history may have been chilly due to a cloud in space that briefly…
Compasses at the bottom of the ocean wobbled as a massive solar storm hit Earth last week, giving the instruments two miles under the sea a jolt of magnetic shock and awe.
On Friday, Earth was hit by the strongest geomagnetic storm in 20 years. Intense solar activity sent bursts of radiation toward Earth, causing fluctuations in the upper atmosphere that led to disruptions in the power grid and radio blackouts, among other technologies and infrastructure.
Inclement weather on the Sun’s surface could affect infrastructure on Earth and in space, scientists are predicting, as our host star approaches its solar maximum.
The recent total solar eclipse on April 8 provided a rare glimpse of the Sun’s roiling corona, including some eye-grabbing prominences. Those views were neat, but a new video captured by Europe’s Sun-buzzing probe is providing some of the best close-up views of our host star that we’ve ever seen.
NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory
The massive galaxy that houses our star system, along with hundreds of billions of other stars, appears as a shimmery splotch stretching across our night skies on clear, moonless nights. For an ancient people who were rather obsessed with the cosmos, looking up at the Milky Way may have symbolized a goddess that hangs…
We were hoping for something like this to happen. For a brief moment yesterday, the Sun waved to us from afar, telling us that it’s in the midst of a vibrant and dynamic phase of its 11-year cycle when solar eruptions and other phenomena are at their peak and more likely to occur.
JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images
