22 August 2017
Total eclipse wows viewers in the US
... but to scientists who study the sun. When the moon obscures the sun, it reveals the normally hidden, halo-like corona - the outermost part of the sun’s atmosphere. The corona is usually hidden by the bright light of the sun's surface, but on such...
10 May 2021
Sun's biggest outburst this cycle is sending solar storms to Earth and Mars
.... Launched in 1995, SOHO has been observing the Sun from an advantage point known as the First Lagrangian Point (L1), where the combined gravity of the Earth and Sun keep SOHO in an orbit locked to the Earth-Sun line. Its LASCO instrument uses a set...
26 November 2021
A closer Moon could have helped the early habitability of our planet
... apparent contradiction between observations of liquid water early in Earth’s history and a low output of the Sun is known as the faint Sun paradox or faint Sun problem. This issue was raised by astronomers Carl Sagan and George Mullen in 1972. Since...
22 July 2020
Astronomers capture the first ever image of a multi-planet system around a Sun-like star
... a star similar to the Sun. The observations can help astronomers understand how ...the Sun; they lie at only 5 and 10 times the Earth-Sun distance, respectively. The team also found the two exoplanets are much heavier than the ones in our Solar System, the...
20 June 2016
Trio of hot Jupiters give clue to their formation
... is a well studied star cluster and recent estimates of the age range of its inhabitants imply that the stars are younger than the Sun (at around 4 billion years). The team state that the high rate – three hot Jupiters around a sample...
19 October 2018
Countdown begins for the launch of BepiColombo
... two regions that are 180 degrees apart, which always have the Sun directly overhead when the planet is closest to the Sun. If you could stand at these points, then the Sun would appear to be almost stationary overhead for two to three weeks...
