News Stories relating to "sun"

The British Royal Academy of Engineering has completed a study of the UK power grid showing that it is relatively well prepared to weather a solar superstorm--but the opposite is true in the United States.

It turns...

How will the world end? It may not end today, but it WILL end someday. After Noah's ark finally reached land, God promised Noah that he would not flood the earth again, that it would be "the fire next time," and despite the rising ocean levels due to glacier melt, Whitley Strieber thinks this may be true. Read all about it in his...

People who don't know their history are fated to repeat their mistakes. It has always been assumed by solar scientists that our sun does not emit the same sort of superflares seen bursting out of similar stars. But now it appears that the sun did emit a superflare in 774 AD, and,...

A mysterious dark band has appeared on the surface of the sun that is almost 500 miles long and is getting bigger every day. Astrophysicists think it's a cluster of dense cold gas. The formation may look dark because it's so much colder than the surface of the sun.

A second huge power outage across India left 600 million people sweltering in the dark. Gigantic traffic jams, stalled railway trains, closed airports and a general failure of infrastructure services have followed in the wake of what is now the largest power failure in history. Power is being restored across the country at this time.

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An X-5 solar flare has sent a coronal mass ejection directly toward earth. The CME is now impacting earth's atmosphere, and has the potential to disrupt satellites, unprotected power grids and global positioning systems. While there may not be a strong effect on well protected satellites and power grids in the developed world, there is a greater...

A passing coronal mass ejection from the sun caused an illumination response from an otherwise invisible object near Mercury that was captured both by NASA's Heliospheric Imager 1 satellite and by the SECCHI-A spacecraft. Initially, SECCHI staff explained it as a video afterimage of the planet on the...

New research suggests solar storms could become more disruptive within decades, affecting things from cell phones to airplanes and spacecraft. In BBC News, Judith Burns quotes space physicist Mike Lockwood was saying, "All the evidence suggests that the Sun will shortly exit from a grand solar maximum that has persisted since before the start...

See the beautiful ivy growing up that wall? On closer inspection, those leaves turn out to be--solar panels! And we may really need them soon, if sunspot activity turns off our electrical grids. This new product is called Solar Ivy and the first location in the United States to apply it is the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, because...

A well-known characteristic of decaying matter--the rate of which has always been constant--has suddenly started behaving mysteriously, and this seems to be caused by a mysterious particle emanating from the sun. In recent years; the carbon decay rates of radioactive elements have begun changing: The decay rate is slightly faster in winter than in...

Researchers have discovered a link between solar flares and radioactive elements on Earth. Amazing as it sounds, the sun, 93 million miles away, seems to be influencing the decay of radioactive elements inside the Earth. David Sereda talks with William Henry...

In winter, Greenland is dark for months and this year the first, brief sunrise was expected on January 13. Instead, the sun rose at 12:56 PM on January 11. The precise reason for this remains unknown. There is no apparent astronomical cause, as the constellations, the moon and the sun appear to be in their usual positions in relation to earth. One...

Climate change is causing changes in our weather, but that's nothing compared to what's happening on the sun. Solar scientists say that the sun's magnetic field is weakening, and we are going to go into a long period of solar inactivity, but NASA remains worried enough about massive solar flares to begin working on a solar shield that will protect...