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Mysterious high-energy particles known as cosmic rays zip through space at a wide range of energies, some millions of times greater than those produced in the world’s most powerful atom smasher. Scientists have long thought cosmic rays from inside our galaxy come from supernova explosions, but a new study has fingered a second source: the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. With this new result, the search for cosmic ray origins, which has frustrated scientists for more than 100 years, has taken an unexpected new twist. “It’s very exciting,” says astrophysicist Andrew Taylor of the Dublin...

NEW DELHI: A special event is about to occur in our sun, and it could impact our lives. The magnetic poles of the sun — which are like the ends of a giant bar magnet — are about to flip, that is, the polar north will become the polar south and vice versa. According to scientists at the Wilcox Solar Observatory at Stanford University , the sun could be barely two to three months away from this magnetic field reversal. The change is periodic, taking place once every 11 years or so. The flip also corresponds with peak activity during...

Enlarge Image Ray maker. The "Jellyfish nebula" (IC 443) and another supernova remnant gave researchers firm evidence that cosmic rays come from exploding stars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA For the past century, physicists have puzzled over cosmic rays, particles (mostly protons) that hurtle through space at high speed and seem to come from all directions equally. What's the source of these galactic projectiles? And how do they come to be traveling so fast? Today, an international team announced a major step toward answering those questions: conclusive evidence that at least some of the cosmic rays come from supernova remnants—expanding shells of...

The sun is moving through the Milky Way slower than previously thought, according to new data from a NASA spacecraft. From its orbit around Earth, the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) satellite measured the speeds of interstellar particles entering at the fringes of our solar system, 9 billion miles (14.5 billion kilometers) from the sun. Plugging the new data into computer models, the IBEX team calculates that the sun is moving at about 52,000 miles (83,700 kilometers) an hour -- about 7,000 miles (11,000 kilometers) slower than thought. The discovery suggests that the protective boundary separating our solar system from the...

Through the Royal Astronomical Society in London the Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark released new scientific evidence in the last week that has not yet hit the mass media. This new examination could revolutionize the way that we view our world’s climate and even the history of life on Earth. Professor Svensmark examined the history of how supernova’s close to our solar system occurred over the last 500 million years. He compared this supernova history to our well known history of the number of different species on Earth over that same time period and found a remarkable correlation.

Calder's Updates Nigel Calder takes the pulse of science, as the author of Magic Universe and Einstein's Universe. He checks predictions of the past half-century, to see how they worked out. And his hand is on the brow of frenzied climatology, as a co-author of The Chilling Stars: A Cosmic View of Climate Change.   CERN experiment confirms cosmic ray action Climate Change – News and CommentsThe global warmists’ dam breaks A graph they'd prefer you not to notice. Tucked away near the end of online supplementary material, and omitted from the printed CLOUD paper in Nature, it clearly shows...

Henrik Svensmark on Global Warming (part 1)Question: What could a climate scientist bring to the debate among physicists over the interaction of cosmic rays with the Earth’s atmosphere? Answer: the coffee. Physicists have long maintained that the question of climate change was properly within the realm of physics rather than that of those glorified weathermen who call themselves “climatologists.” Last week we got confirmation of that. It came in the form of a study by physicists in Switzerland .  The study, which was published in the prestigious peer-reviewed science publication Nature, gave support to an alternative theory of climate change...

Nature Journal of Science, ranked as the world’s most cited scientific periodical, has just published the definitive study on Global Warming that proves the dominant controller of temperatures in the Earth’s atmosphere is due to galactic cosmic rays and the sun, rather than by man. One of the report’s authors, Professor Jyrki Kauppinen, summed up his conclusions regarding the potential for man-made Global Warming: “I think it is such a blatant falsification.” The research was conducted by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which invented the World Wide Web, built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and now has...

You can hear the desperation in their voices. The stridency of their attacks. The proponents of the failed theory of man made global warming see their golden-egg laying goose slowly being roasted. Al Gore calls skeptics "the new 'racists.'" Earlier this month, ManBearPig (Gore) launched into a tirade of obscene language attacking those who question his pet theory--a theory, by the way, which has made him quite wealthy--and before that, he compared skeptics to Nazis. Has he no shame? . . . Of course not, HE'S A LIBERAL. The degree of their stridency will tell you just how desperate the...

CERN's 8,000 scientists may not be able to find the hypothetical Higgs boson, but they have made an important contribution to climate physics, prompting climate models to be revised. The first results from the lab's CLOUD ("Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets") experiment published in Nature today confirm that cosmic rays spur the formation of clouds through ion-induced nucleation. Current thinking posits that half of the Earth's clouds are formed through nucleation. The paper is entitled Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation. This has significant implications for climate science because water vapour and clouds play...

Mystery Cosmic Rays Zapping South Pole -- "From the Neutron Star of the Vela Supernova?" Cosmic rays zapping the Earth over the South Pole appear to be coming from particular locations, rather than being distributed uniformly across the sky. Cosmic ray "hotspots" have also been seen in the northern skies too, yet there is no source close enough to produce this strange pattern.... We don't know where they are coming from," says Stefan Westerhoff of the University of Wisconsin, who used the IceCube neutrino observatory at the South Pole with a team of colleagues to create the most comprehensive map...

A "telescope" buried deep under Antarctic ice has detected the first signals that scientists hope will allow them to identify the source of mysterious particles that bombard Earth from outer space. For the past ten years scientists have been planning and building an ambitious experiment to explain the mystery of what produces the cosmic rays and elusive particles known as neutrinos, which constantly pepper our planet. more at Telegraph.co.UK

From deep space, cosmic rays come fast and pack a heck of a punch. They may also carry clues to the most vexing mysteries in the universe. Nothing on the tree-less plains of western Argentina seems to expend much energy. Cattle stand nearly motionless as they graze on the thin grass, which grows slowly in the dry heat and high altitude. A cylindrical water tank with a small solar panel and a skyward-facing antenna sits unobtrusively in the nearly motionless landscape. But hidden within this scene is plenty of drama. At any given moment, millions of projectiles from deep space...

A group of environmental scientists and the United Nations has discovered the sun is causing much of the global warming we experience today. “We’ve suspected this for some time,” said IPCC regular contributor Gordy Columbo. “But there was no way to prove it. Now we can.” The scientists checked the temperature of the atmosphere in the daylight, when the sun was shining, and at night, when the sun was not. Amazingly, they found the daylight temperatures to be much warmer.

The CLOUD team will be able to recreate the conditions of any part of the atmosphere inside the new chamber, from the polar stratosphere to the low level tropics. The link between cosmic rays and climate change is one that has been hotly debated over the past decade, grabbing the attention of the media. The idea revolves around the possibility that particles entering the atmosphere from space can affect cloud formation, which in turn affects the climate. But despite the controversy surrounding the theory, the central question – ‘do cosmic rays help create clouds?’ – has barely been tested in...

Climate Change: A peer-reviewed study by a respected Canadian physicist blames the interplay of cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons for 20th-century warming. The CFCs are now gone, and so is warming — perhaps for the next 50 years. Much of the nation got a white Christmas this year, some in unprecedented quantities. A record-breaking storm deposited 12 to 30 inches of snow in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. Many places set records for the most snow in a single December day as more than 50% of the U.S. was covered by the white stuff. Scientists (and here we use the word...

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Turns out a little radiation is good for you -- if you're a tree at least Scientists have discovered that tree growth appears to be spurred by increased amounts of Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs). (Source: Sigrid Dengel) Scientists often see the need to confirm what we already know.  For example, every 11-year-old (or 41-year-old) comic book fan living with their parents knows radiation makes organisms grow bigger and stronger.  However, for those who don't read comics or have hyperactive imaginations, that presumption turns out to be somewhat true -- for trees at least. A new study from the University of...

Increase means NASA may need to rethink astronauts’ radiation shielding Galactic cosmic rays have just hit a Space Age high, new data from a NASA spacecraft indicates. "In 2009, cosmic ray intensities have increased 19 percent beyond anything we've seen in the past 50 years," said Richard Mewaldt of Caltech. "The increase is significant, and it could mean we need to re-think how much radiation shielding astronauts take with them on deep-space missions." The surge, which poses no threat to Earth, was detected by NASA's ACE (Advanced Composition Explorer) spacecraft. The cause of the surge is solar minimum, a deep...

This offers renewed hope for Svensmark’s theory of cosmic ray modulation of earth’s cloud cover. Here is an interesting correlation published just yesterday in GRL. Cosmic rays detected deep underground reveal secrets of the upper atmosphere Watch the video animation here (MPEG video will play in your media player) Published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters and led by scientists from the UK’s National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), this remarkable study shows how the number of high-energy cosmic-rays reaching a detector deep underground, closely matches temperature measurements in the upper atmosphere...