Our Sun may live a pretty lonesome life nowadays, but when it was born some 4.6 billion years ago, it was the middle child in a family of thousands. All of these siblings have since spread throughout the galaxy, which makes it hard to identify them. But now astronomers in
Tag: sun
Orbital Forensics Hint at Sun’s Long-Lost Planet
Our solar system is like a 4.6-billion-year-old crime scene. Crater-ridden surfaces, misaligned planetary orbits and streams of interplanetary debris are the cosmic equivalents of blood spatters on the wall and skid marks from a getaway car. These and other clues tell of a chaotic beginning for our planetary family. Buried in those
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is attempting to touch the sun
We have sent probes zooming throughout our local solar system. There have been human landings on the moon, asteroid touchdowns, and planetary flybys aplenty. Voyager 1 is still zooming off into the deep stretch of interstellar space beaming us back information until the mid-2020s. We’ve been to a lot of
Astrophysicists Just Saw an Amazing Structure in the Sun’s Outer Atmosphere
The sun is a giant, churning ball of gases, with an atmosphere that flings streamers and blobs of particles into space. Now, astrophysicists have found that inside the sun's atmosphere, what may seem like cosmic clutter hides some beautiful order. Particularly, they found and imaged finely detailed streamers, blobs and puffs
