25 May 2020
Clashing galaxies may have triggered Solar System formation says new study
...as one encounter is suggested to be roughly coincident with the time of the formation of the Sun some 4.7 billion years ago. “The Sun formed at the time when stars were forming in the Milky Way because of the first passage of Sagittarius,” says Carme...
June 2017
Bepi-Colombo will unveil Mercury’s secrets
... Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), had noticed that the period of the spacecraft’s orbit around the Sun, after it flew past Mercury, would be almost exactly twice the period of the planet itself, so the spacecraft and the planet would meet again and, with...
January 2019
Visiting an asteroid to find out how life began
... first, operations will pause as the Sun will get in the way. Solar conjunction occurs when the Sun moves between Ryugu and the Earth, interfering with communication with the spacecraft. From the end of November to the end of December, communication...
May 2021
Forecasting space-weather effects on Earth
... stream of particles and magnetic fields released by the Sun is called the solar wind. The Sun’s intense magnetic field can, in places, prevent the heat of the interior from reaching the surface, creating relatively cooler zones called sunspots...
January 2022
Revealing the magnetic universe
..., but as it lost mass via nuclear fusion and the outward flowing solar wind, the rotation slowed down and the magnetic activity decreased. Over the last 4.6 billion years, the Sun has completed nearly twenty revolutions around our galactic...
August 2018
Flying to the stars
... distances involved. Imagine for a moment that the distance between our Sun and the Earth is one metre. The Sun would be the size of a grain of salt on this scale. Still, the closest star to our Sun, Proxima Centauri, would be more than 265 km away...
