Burning Questions about the SUN: New spacecraft are helping scientists understand our star better

How Does the Sun Lose Its Spots?
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Earlier this month, NASA announced scientists had finally figured out why sunspots disappear, which has mystified scientists for at least 200 years. It has to do with the sun’s insides, which are churning around much like ocean currents on the Earth.

The culprit was plasma currents within the sun that interfered with the production of sunspots, scientists said in a paper published March 3. These so-called meridional flows act as a great conveyor belt, sweeping along the sun’s surface, plunging deep inside at the poles and emerging again near the equator.

Sunspots are highly magnetized areas of plasma on the sun’s surface, and like anything else, they have a lifespan. When they start to die and de-magnetize, the conveyor belt sweeps them away and drags the plasma into the heart of the sun, where the sun’s magnetic “dynamo” (the name for the mechanism that creates the sun’s magnetic field) recharges them. Then they reappear.

But in 2008, the sunspot reincarnation wasn’t happening. Scientists think it was because back in the late 1990s, the plasma currents had been moving too fast for the dynamo to do its job, and the sunspots couldn’t be recharged. Even after the currents sped up again in the early 2000s, there weren’t enough sunspots to recharge. The result was the deepest solar minimum in a century, and it led to a late start for Solar Cycle 24, which began in early 2010.

Why Is Its Atmosphere Hotter Than Its Surface?
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It’s a long-standing mystery of physics: “You don’t expect a star that’s hot in the middle to get hotter as it goes away from the surface,” said NASA project scientist Joe Gurman, who works on the Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) mission. But somehow the sun’s surface, around 11,000 degrees, is cool compared to the superheated corona, which reaches millions of degrees. What brings this extra warmth to the sun’s atmosphere?

In January, scientists said they may have an answer: Plasma fountains called spicules, like those seen here, that shoot up from the chromosphere. That’s an area just above the sun’s surface. The plasma fountains are as long as Earth and last a few minutes, but a newly observed class of spicules lasts about 100 seconds, moving 186,000 miles per hour. The Solar Dynamics Observatory and the Japanese Hinode spacecraft (meaning “dawn”) were able to catch them in action.

Is the Sun Spewing Mystery Particles?
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Last year, we told you how Fischbach and his colleagues at Purdue University noticed a change in the radioactive decay rate of a manganese isotope, and tied it to a solar flare. They determined that something came out of the sun, traveled through the Earth, hit a piece of manganese-54 and changed the rate at which it emitted ionizing particles. They have since been checking other radioisotope data and the pattern is clear, Fischbach said.

“It becomes very difficult to avoid the conclusion that we’re seeing something new,” he said. “There is no explanation at the present that can account for it, other than something of unknown origin.” It gets better: They also realized the Dec. 13 anomaly started a day and a half before the flare. So whatever is messing with radioactive decay is also apparently a harbinger of some major solar activity. The most reasonable explanation is solar neutrinos, but these are essentially massless and do not interact with normal matter — which is why they can travel through the planet in the first place. So it's still a mystery.

Can 3-D Views and Solar X-Rays Explain the Origin of Solar Flares?

Solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are the holy grail of sun research — scientists want to be able to predict when they’ll happen, but central to that ability is a deeper understanding of how they are produced. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory will help scientists study the life cycle of the sun’s magnetic field, which will explain the genesis of flares and CMEs, said Dean Pesnell, project scientist for SDO.

If We Could Touch, Taste and Smell the Sun, What Would We Learn?

Source: www.popsci.com...

I just love IT. Seriously. The pictures alone are amazing but the info in the article is fascinating.

Just us Humans having the abilitiy and desire to even wonder about such things-much less make the tools/items we need to "go after it" (so-to-speak).

I need to learn more about the Sun... Sad to think that the thing that makes life possible can easily destroy us too.

I like to see nature in it's natural form, so why is it all these pictures taken in space always look over exposed or photoshopped.

reply to post by kindred



I hear you but I figure since I will most likely never venture out into Space that I HAVE to take what they are presenting. I know...

But, better than nothing.

reply to post by kindred


Overexposed would be blank white nothing, if anything these photos are severely underexposed so you can see detail of any sort. The other unnatural colored photos are images of wavelengths outside of our visual spectrum. That being said you cannot have an opinion on the exposure whatsoever, because you simply cannot see those wavelengths.

If you don't like what is being presented to you go out there and shoot it yourself, or seek another source and compare.