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The sun

Space

Could we put out the sun with a sun-sized orb of water?

What would happen if we pushed a sun-sized ball of water into our star? The Dead Planets Society podcast dives into the possibilities

News

Space

Solar flares made in the lab could teach us about the real thing

News

Andrew McCarthy and Jason Guenzel 140 megapixel image of the sun

Comment

Dazzlingly detailed photo of a record solar tornado '14 Earths tall'

Regulars

Northern lights, aurora borealis, over Fort William, Scotland, on 27 February 2023

Space

Northern lights: The best pictures of the aurora taken across the UK

News

An extensive erupting prominence taken on 15 May, 2001 -- Prominences are huge clouds of relatively cool dense plasma suspended in the Sun's hot, thin corona. At times, they can erupt, escaping the Sun's atmosphere. Emission in this spectral line of EIT 304? shows the upper chromosphere at a temperature of about 60,000 degrees K. The hottest areas appear almost white, while the darker red areas indicate cooler temperatures.

Space

Sunquakes may be caused by weird beams of electrons from solar flares

News

A solar storm

Health

Solar storms may cause up to 5500 heart-related deaths in a given year

News

Diffractive solar sails, depicted in this conceptual illustration, could enable missions to hard-to-reach places, like orbits over the Sun?s poles. Credits: MacKenzi Martin

Space

NASA awards $2 million to advance rainbow-coloured solar sail project

News

An artistic impression of the high-frequency retrograde (HFR) vorticity waves. These waves appear as swirling motions near the equator of the Sun. The rotation in the north is always anti-symmetric to the rotation in the southern hemisphere. These mysterious waves move in the opposite direction to the sun's rotation, which is to the right, three times faster then what is allowed by hydrodynamics alone.

Space

Strange waves in the sun are travelling far faster than they should be

News

Parker Solar Probe near the sun

Space

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is the first spacecraft to 'touch' the sun

News

On August 31, 2012 a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun's atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space at 4:36 p.m. EDT. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled at over 900 miles per second. The CME did not travel directly toward Earth, but did connect with Earth's magnetic environment, or magnetosphere, causing aurora to appear on the night of Monday, September 3. Picuted here is a lighten blended version of the 304 and 171 angstrom wavelengths. Cropped Credit: NASA/GSFC/SDO NASA image use policy. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA???s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA???s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency???s mission. Follow us on Twitter Like us on Facebook Find us on Instagram

Space

Monster cloud of plasma spotted spewing out of a distant star

A coronal mass ejection from the star EK Draconis was 10 times larger than any we have seen on our own sun

News

Space

Mysterious origin of Earth's water may be explained by solar wind

News

Space

Partial solar eclipse will be visible in the UK and Ireland on 10 June

News

Space

NASA's Parker Solar Probe has gone faster than any spacecraft ever

News

Space

Sun's bumpy magnetic fields might explain why its atmosphere is so hot

News

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