sun

Astronomers Observe Planets Around Another Star Like Never Before
03/12/2013 - 20:01

Thanks to a new high-tech gadget, astronomers have observed four planets orbiting a star relatively close to the sun in unprecedented detail, revealing the roughly ten-Jupiter-mass planets to be among the most exotic ones known.

 

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NASA telescope observes how sun stores and releases energy
01/23/2013 - 20:17

A NASA suborbital telescope has given scientists the first clear evidence of energy transfer from the sun's magnetic field to the solar atmosphere or corona. This process, known as solar braiding, has been theorized by researchers, but remained unobserved until now.

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Evidence for Local Acceleration of CIR-Associated Suprathermal Particles at 1 AU
12/18/2012 - 18:31

Corotating interaction regions (CIRs) form when a stream of fast solar wind overtakes a parcel of slow wind that was emitted from the Sun at an earlier time. This interaction creates a compression region that corotates with the Sun and can strengthen to form shocks that accelerate particles.

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Solar Corona Revealed in Super-High-Definition
07/20/2012 - 16:41

Today, astronomers are releasing the highest-resolution images ever taken of the Sun's corona, or million-degree outer atmosphere, in an extreme-ultraviolet wavelength of light. The 16-megapixel images were captured by NASA's High Resolution Coronal Imager, or Hi-C, which was launched on a sounding rocket on July 11th. The Hi-C telescope provides five times more detail than the next-best observations by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.

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Unexpectedly slow motions below the Sun’s surface
07/20/2012 - 16:10

The interior motions of the Sun are much slower than predicted. Rather than moving at the speed of a jet plane (as previously understood) the plasma flows at a walking pace. The result of this new study, whose lead author is from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, will be published in an upcoming issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).

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Plasma startup creates high-energy light to make smaller microchips
06/28/2012 - 14:42

A University of Washington lab has been working for more than a decade on fusion energy, harnessing the energy-generating mechanism of the sun. But in one of the twists of scientific discovery, on the way the researchers found a potential solution to a looming problem in the electronics industry.

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