'Deathstar' like object spotted near sun

Source: Yahoo!7 News
March 15, 2012, 11:28 am

A NASA video of a dark, disc shaped object hovering near the sun has set off a wave of speculation online as amateur astronomers try to figure out what the object could be.

The video, taken from a NASA satellite and uploaded to Youtube by a man calling himself SunsFlare, shows a huge round object floating near the sun, with a large 'twister tail' extending from it.

The video shows the sun's rays bursting out from the surface, but a large circular object remains black, with a dark 'twister tail' remaining connected to the sun.

"I have no idea what it is", SunsFlare says, "There's something in the plasma field that would definitely be affected by the [burst of energy]."

Over 380,000 people have viewed the video in the few days since it was uploaded.

Is it the Deathstar?

A NASA video of a dark, disc shaped object hovering near the sun has set off a wave of speculation online.

However NASA says it has an explanation for the anomaly.

It's not the Deathstar, another planet being born or a UFO full of little green men as some viewers suspected.
It's simply a filament, or prominence.

NASA says a filament is a "large, bright feature extending outward from the Sun's surface. [Filaments] are anchored to the Sun's surface in the photosphere, and extend outwards into the Sun's hot outer atmosphere, called the corona."

But NASA can't explain why the object is cooler than the energy around it, and therefore remains dark when viewed from NASA’s telescope.

A NASA astrophysicist says the image is completely normal.

"Filaments appear to be dark because they're cooler in relation to what's in the background. When you look at it from the edge of the sun, what you see is this spherical object and you're actually looking down the tunnel."

NASA says it is rare for a prominence to form as such a distinct shape however.
Generally, a prominence comes in the form of a violent outburst, rather than the sphere seen in the video above.

Space storm fizzles on arrival

Source: Yahoo! 7 News
AFP
Updated March 9, 2012, 5:45 am

A bit of a fizzer

A solar storm that shook the Earth's magnetic field has spared satellite systems, delivering only a glancing blow.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A space weather storm that was forecast to be the strongest in five years has fizzled out and ended up causing no impact to power grids or modern navigation systems, US experts said on Thursday.

A series of eruptions on the Sun this week sent radiation and solar plasma hurtling toward Earth at high speeds but in the end, the geomagnetic storm registered the lowest level, G1, on a five-step scale.

"Our forecasters really struggled with this one," said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist Joseph Kunches, comparing the bungled forecast to watching a pitcher toss a baseball but knowing nothing else until it reaches the catcher.

"We missed the spin on the ball," said Kunches.

NOAA had forecast the storm would be a level three, or "strong," and said it would be the worst since 2006. NASA had said it might even be "severe."

In this case, the "spin" that forecasters missed was contained in the orientation of the magnetic field inside the coronal mass ejection from the Sun that raced toward Earth and arrived early Thursday after a 34-hour journey.

"It is very difficult for forecasters, literally almost impossible, as you watch the coronal mass ejection come off the Sun to be able to predict the orientation of that embedded magnetic field," he said.
Kunches said there were no reports of GPS disruption, no reports of problems in terms of electric power, and that anticipated displays of the northern lights, or aurora borealis, would be visible further north than NOAA initially said.

However, the impacts could worsen over the next 24 hours as the storm continues, he said.
NOAA and NASA had warned on Wednesday that the storm could disrupt global positioning systems, satellites and power grids, and had already caused some air carriers to change their planes' polar flight paths.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station were not affected by the radiation storm, NASA said.

Geomagnetic and radiation storms are growing more frequent as the Sun leaves its solar minimum period and moves into a solar maximum over the coming years, but people are generally protected by Earth's magnetic field.

However, some experts are concerned that because the world is more reliant on GPS and satellite technology now than it was during the last solar maximum, more disruptions to modern life are likely.

The fuss began late Sunday at an active region on the Sun known as 1429, with a big solar flare that was associated with a coronal mass ejection that thrust toward the Earth at some four million miles (6.4 million kilometers) per hour).

A pair of solar flares and a CME followed overnight Tuesday-Wednesday.

NASA said the first of the two flares on March 6-7 -- classified in the potent X class and facing directly at the Earth -- was the biggest this year and one of the largest of this cycle known as the solar minimum, which began in early 2007.

In fact, it was second only to a stronger one that erupted in August.

The solar flares alone caused brief high frequency radio blackouts that have already passed, according to NOAA.

But while solar radiation storm registered a level 3, the geomagnetic storm ended up being the same minor level as a similar event in January, Kunches said.

Solar storm headed toward Earth

Source: Yahoo!7 News
AAPMarch 8, 2012, 4:01 am

 Storm to hit Earth today

Power grids, GPS devices and plane flights may be disrupted by a solar storm headed towards Earth.

An impressive solar flare is heading toward Earth and could disrupt power grids, GPS and aeroplane flights.

Forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Centre said the sun erupted on Tuesday evening and the effects should start smacking Earth close to 1600 AEDT on Thursday. They say it is the biggest in five years and growing.
The magnetic storm has the potential to trip electrical power grids.
Its radio emissions can disrupt global positioning systems to make them less accurate. It also could damage satellites.
Scientists said communication problems and radiation from the storm will probably force aeroplanes to avoid flying over the north and south poles. Colourful auroras may be more visible.

Sun's deadly dance caught on camera

Source:
Yahoo!7
February 18, 2012, 9:40 am

Astronomers were given a spectacular show on the sun as a "solar tornado" made its way across the surface.

The footage, captured over a 30-hour period by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. captures the slow-moving solar flares as they danced across the surface.

The large solar "tornadoes" blasted across the surface of the sun on February 7 and 8, and are formed by the magnetic field created by the star.

"An active region rotating into view provides a bright backdrop to the gyrating streams of plasma," SDO mission scientists were quoted as saying on space.com. "The particles are being pulled this way and that by competing magnetic forces. They are tracking along strands of magnetic field lines."

NASA finds Earth-size planets outside solar system

NASA discivers Earth- size planets

Source:Yahoo!7
Reuters
December 21, 2011, 7:44 am

     Super moon photo

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - NASA's Kepler mission has discovered the first Earth-size planets orbiting a sun-like star outside our solar system, a milestone in the search for planets like the earth, the space agency said on Tuesday.

The planets, called Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, are the smallest planets outside the solar system confirmed around a star like the Sun, NASA said in a statement.

The planets are too close to their star to be in the so-called habitable zone where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface.

"This discovery demonstrates for the first time that Earth-size planets exist around other stars, and that we are able to detect them," Francois Fressin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said in the statement.

The new planets are thought to be rocky. Kepler-20e is slightly smaller than Venus, measuring 0.87 times the radius of Earth.

Kepler-20f is slightly larger than Earth, measuring 1.03 times its radius. Both planets are in a five-planet system called Kepler-20, about 1,000 light-years away in the constellation Lyra.

Kepler-20e orbits its parent star every 6.1 days and Kepler-20f every 19.6 days.

Kepler-20f, at 800 degrees Fahrenheit, is similar to an average day on the planet Mercury. The surface temperature of Kepler-20e, at more than 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, would melt glass.

The Kepler space telescope detects planets and planet candidates by measuring dips in the brightness of more than 150,000 stars as planets cross in front their stars.

NASA is an acronym for National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Jerry Norton)

Stormy sun could knock out power grids: report

Sourece: Yahoo!7
Ethan Bilby, Reuters

Bad space period ahead

A high impact sun storm could cause power blackouts and economic losses of over $1 trillion, a report has claimed.

LONDON (Reuters) - An upcoming cycle of stormy solar activity risks causing damage to electrical transformers and threatening vulnerable energy infrastructure around the globe, a report by an insurance group says.

The sun follows a predictable 11 year activity cycle, with the next period of stormy activity expected to begin in 2012-13.

The report by German insurance group Allianz said a high impact solar storm, not easily predicted due to its recorded rarity, could cause blackouts and economic losses of over $1 trillion and that the worst case scenario would be even worse.

"What we're coming into at the moment is the bad (space)weather period," Jim Wild of Britain's Lancaster University, an expert in solar plasma physics, told Reuters.

A large explosion on the surface of the sun could release billions of tones of superheated magnetically charged gas at a speed of a million miles per hour, and when that gas hits the earth's magnetic field, it can trigger a big solar storm.

The severity of a potential disruption has made experts at insurance and national security institutions take notice.

"When you start to imagine not having electricity in a sizeable fraction of a country or a continent for weeks or even months ... it's serious business," Wild said.

SMALL LEAD TIME

The difficulty lies in predicting how often serious solar type events occur.

The small lead time given by satellites is also a problem for preventing solar storm damage, as currently no satellite is close enough to the sun to give more than an hour's warning, Wild said.
Updating the satellites to give the earth more preparation time would cost around $1 billion, he added.

Space weather is a relatively new area of study, with sophisticated observations going back only 50 years and lacking an international coordinated tracking system such as that found with normal meteorological weather.

"We have very little on a solar time scale," Wild said.

The most damaging storm in recent memory was a 1989 outage in Quebec, Canada, which affected six million people.

The first scientific recording of a large solar storm was made in 1859 by English astronomer Richard Carrington, who observed a white light explosion on the surface of the sun.

Wild said: "what they didn't know back then was why about two or three days later you could see the northern lights over Cuba and all of the telegraph system was disrupted by geomagnetic activity."

According to the Allianz report, an event on the same scale today would cause extensive damage to electrical infrastructure.

(Editing by Henning Gloystein and James Jukwey)

Scientists uncover 70-million-year old dinosaur nest

Excellent  old dinosaur discover

Yahoo!7
November 19, 2011, 9:55 am

     Nest full of baby dinosaurs found. Photo: Discovery News

Scientists have uncovered a 70-million-year old nest filled with 15 baby dinosaurs in Mongolia, Discovery News has reported.

The round nest contains at least 10 complete fossil sets and measures 2.3 feet in diameter, researchers have said.

The researchers conclude that all the 15 dinosaurs show juvenile characteristics including short snouts, large eyes, and no prominent horns and large frills associated with adults of this species.
The babies were identified as the Protoceratops andrewsi, which were four-legged herbivores.

Researchers say the find provides unique insights in to the parental behaviour of the adult dinosaurs and reveals that the babies were kept in the nest and taken care of before they were big enough.

According to Live Science, researcher David Fastovsky, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Rhode Island, said, "It's quite striking that there are 15 juvenile Protoceratops here - that seems like a lot to care for.”

“But they were living in a harsh environment, so perhaps mortality rates were high. The evidence suggests they may have been overrun by migrating dunes during a sandstorm,” he adds.

Discovery reported the nest and the fossils of the babies are currently housed at the Paleontological Center of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, Ulan Baatar, Mongolia.