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NASA has revealed that a massive hole, measuring more than ten per cent of the Sun's surface area, has opened up on our star. ... NASA says the huge hole is actually not of great concern, but it remains unclear why the coronal holes actually form. ..

Phil PlaitNovember 16, 2015 A new study says that violent space weather that could cost $2 trillion in damage is more common than previously thought In the years 774 and 993, the Earth was attacked from space. Not by aliens, but by a natural event—and it was very, very powerful. Whatever it was, it subtly altered the chemistry of our planet’s atmosphere, creating trace amounts of radioactive elements like chlorine-36, beryllium-10, and carbon-14. And those provide the clue to what the event was: Those isotopes are created when high-energy protons slam into our air. That means the source must have...

A team of nearly 100 physicists from around the world have achieved results verifying that the elementary particle known as the neutrino exhibits a distinctive pattern of oscillation. This discovery shows that it is likely that the Standard Model, proposed in the 1970s to describe the fundamental forces and particles that make up all matter, is incomplete. The findings provide the needed confirmation to their previous discovery of neutrino oscillation and give the most precise measurement yet of neutrino mass. “These findings show that the Standard Model needs to be modified to better explain the fundamental forces that make up...

To understand the coronal heating problem, imagine a flame coming out of an ice cube. A similar effect occurs on the surface of the Sun. Nuclear fusion in the center of the Sun heats the solar core to 15 million degrees. Moving away from this furnace, by the time one arrives at the surface of the Sun, the gas has cooled to a relatively refreshing 10,800° Fahrenheit (6,000° Celsius). But the temperature of the gas in the corona, above the solar surface, soars back up to over 1.8 million degrees F (1 million degrees C). What causes this unexpected temperature...

Explanation: Why does this star have so few heavy elements? Stars born in the generation of our Sun have an expected abundance of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium mixed into their atmospheres. Stars born in the generation before our Sun, Population II stars, the stars that created most of the heavy elements around us today, are seen to have some, although less, elements heavier than H and He. Furthermore, even the elusive never-seen first stars in the universe, so-called Population III stars, are predicted to have a large mass and a small but set amount of heavy elements. Yet...

Astronomers have recently discovered that their earlier “explanation” for anomalous heating of Saturn’s upper atmosphere doesn’t work. The temperatures of the upper atmospheres of giant planets have long presented a conundrum to astronomers. They are hotter than can be explained by absorbed sunlight, and other attempts to explain the temperature anomalies in mechanical terms have met with failure. The electrical theorists suggest that such problems will persist as long as astronomers ignore electricity. Since the giant planets display spectacular auroras at their polar regions, scientists believed that these auroras generated heat that was somehow directed toward the planets' equators. On...