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It's been a week since a solar observatory was mysteriously closed -- and we still don't know why

Everyone loves a good mystery, but this is just weird.

Despite slowing solar activity, NASA spots larger-than-Earth sunspot

It seems like a freckle, but this freckle is larger than the Earth.

Sun to flip its magnetic field in a few months

The Sun is gearing up for a major polarity switch, NASA announced: the North Pole which was in the northern hemisphere, has now started pointing south. The solar magnetic polarity reversal cycle has an 11 year period, which is still not fully understood. “This always happens around the time of solar maximum,” says David Hathaway, […]

Sun's magnetic 'heartbeat' is discovered

A magnetic solar ‘heartbeat’ beats deep down in the Sun’s interior, generating energy that leads to solar flares and sunspots. Solar flares and sunspots A solar flare is a large energy release in the form of a sudden brightening of the surface or the solar limb. The flare ejects clouds of electrons, ions, and atoms […]

NASA observers rapidly growing sun spot

What you see in this picture is two black spots on the sun, known as sunspots, which appeared quickly over the course of Feb. 19-20, 2013 and have grown quickly over the past couple of days. Sunspots are temporary phenomena on the Sun that appear visibly as dark spots compared to surrounding regions; they are […]

Powerful solar flare headed our way set to spark beautiful Northern Lights

Astronomers have surprised a blast of charged solar particles erupting from a massive solarspot, recently. The unleashed X-class solar flare is expected to reach Earth’s magnetic field on Saturday morning (2:52 p.m. EDT). Scientists warrant that there’s a chance temporary disruptions to GPS signals, radio communications and power grids might occur. Of greater interest for most of […]

Superflares 10,000 times more powerful than those in our solar system, observed on sun-like stars

Some stars, most often during their early life, exhibit an intense and energetic behavior, much greater than that of our own sun, despite a similar size, per say. In the first survey of its kind, scientists at Kyoto University have analyzed sun flares erupting on the surface of distant stars through out our galaxy. They found […]

Huge sunspots the size of the Earth warns of potential massive solar storms

Astronomers have observed a huge sunspot group on the surface of the sun, sized at more than 60,000 miles across, which might outbreak in a potentially hazardous solar storm. From time to time, the sun spews huge energy releases called solar flares, which depending on their magnitude (the weakest are “C” class and the most powerful are […]

Sunspot 1302: big, bad, and coming our way

Every three hours throughout the day, magnetic observers located all around our planet measure the biggest magnetic change that their instruments can record during that period. All the measured values are averaged all over the world and an index is obtained (the Kp index), telling researchers how disturbed the Earth’s magnetic field is on a […]

First time 360 view of the SUN

Forget the Moon – for the first time ever we have a full view of the star in our solar system, as can be seen from images recently released by NASA. The pictures of the Sun were taken with the STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory). The goal of the project is to monitor movements of […]

The most detailed photo of a Sun Spot to date captured by the Big Bear Solar Observatory

Now, that’s not Sauron’s eye. Pictured above is the most highly detailed photo of a sunspot ever taken at present date, captured and recently released by the Big Bear Solar Observatory, CA. The whole event was captured by Big Bear’s New Solar Telescope (NST), which has a resolution covering about 50 miles on the Sun’s […]