News Stories relating to "sun"

Astonished scientists have never seen anything like it. - A solar eruption has appeared that scientists are describingas "jaw dropping" and "amazing." The activity, on the sun'seastern limb, has the appearance of a gigantic volcano andmay be a precursor to a major sunspot. For some months now,solar scientists have been...

We recentlywrote that "After a period of exceptionally high activityin the 20th century, our sun has suddenly gone exceptionallyquiet?Astronomers are waiting for the sunspots to return andmark the start of the next, the so-called cycle 24. Theyhave been waiting for a while now with no sign it's on itsway any time soon." Well, solar cycle 24 has...

The sun's warm rays can not only give you skin cancer, they can also PEVENT it! Now that fall is here, if you're not getting out in the sun as much as you did in the summer, you also may not be getting enough vitamin D. A recent study shows a direct link between vitamin D and cancer prevention.

Researcher Joan Lappe warns that this is a...

The next sunspot cycle begins in 2011 and is expected to beamong the most powerful in recent memory, but after that,the sun is going to sleep. Should it remain quiescent, thiscould mean that, by 2015, we'll be heading for anotherperiod similar to the 'Maunder Minimum,' or Little Ice Age,that affected the world from roughly 1550 to 1850....

An exceptionally large sunspot has appeared on our side ofthe sun. Sunspot 875 is already the size of the planetNeptune and is continuing to grow. It has a "beta gamma"magnetic field and as of April 26 harbors energy for X Class, orstrong, solar flares.

The spot has appeared during the solar minimum, and thepresence of such a large spot...

A stunning new scientific report predicts that the next sunspot cycle will be massively more powerful than the one just past, which was among the most powerful on record. This is going to cause intense climate disruptions on earth, including surface heating from coronal mass ejections, which is believed to have caused numerous forest fires...

The sun is extremely active right now. Between September 7 and September 10, there were no fewer than 7 X-class solar flares, including one monster, an X-17, which was the 8th largest ever recorded. The Space Weather Observatory estimates that there is a 75% chance of more X-class flares emerging from extremely active sunspot 798. This gigantic...

A geomagnetic storm that took place on the sun yesterday hasbeen classified by the NOAA Space Environment Center inBoulder, Colorado as an "extreme event," measuing G-5, whichis the highest level on the NOAA Space Weather Scale.

The K-Index, which measures the degree of deviation ofEarth's magnetic field over three-hour periods,...

In an extremely rare event, a communications satellite hasstopped communicating, resulting in no telephone service for10 South Pacific nations. The hundred million dollar IS-804satellite stopped relaying phone calls on Saturday. It'sprobably still in orbit, but no longer pointing its antennaetoward Earth. This could have been caused by the...

On January 21, 2004, Unknowncountry.com published a storyabout a strange object that appeared near the sun in animage taken by NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.The object was dismissed by NASA first as a system artifact,then as a star or space debris.

Now, almost exactly a year later, another such object hasappeared in a new...

If you're getting ready for a final trip to the beach inAugust, be prepared. Researchers have found that it can beeasier to get sunburned when standing up than while lyingdown sunbathing. And a "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico iscausing shark attacks along the Texas coast.

The dead zone has appeared in the gulf every year for thelast 30...

One reason for the wild summer weather around the globecould be that the sun is experiencing it as well. July of2004 has seen some unusual solar weather. The sunspot countas of July 17 was 142. A few daysago, sunspot 649, larger than Jupiter emitted an X-3 classsolar flare and sent a coronal mass ejection toward earth.

Scientists are...

The Sun nearly shut down the Earth last November when a wave of massive explosions on the Sun threatened power grids all over the world. This solar flare, which hasn't been measured until now, was so violent that satellite detectors were unable to record its true size. It shot charged electrical particles and gas into space at two million miles...

With solar storms at a historic high, NASA is worried about the radiation that's raining down on astronauts. They're developing a radiation shield that can be used on spacecraft, shuttles and the International Space Station.

NASA's Ed Semmes says, "Going anywhere in the solar system or universe will depend on protecting crews from...