Tag: sun

Space & Time Posted on

NASA’s New Coronal Mass Ejection Close-Up Will Melt Your Brain

Image: Sunspot/NASA If one were to land on the Sun in some mythical spacecraft resistant to two million or so degrees Fahrenheit, they might be surprised at the temperatures encountered. Passing through the upper layers of said star, our solar passenger would find temperatures plummeting as they came closer and closer to the boiling plasma surface, from many millions of degrees in the Sun’s upper atmosphere to a mere 10,000 or so degrees Fahrenheit as they entered the Sun’s “interior.” As solar material is ejected from that interior, it gains energy and heats up as it moves outward into space. The atmospheric zones where this heating occurs are the chromosphere and the transition region. Together they form a volatile and rather mysterious zone of […] Read More

Science Posted on

Scientific Paradoxes are Omens of Advance

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.” –Charles Darwin There are problems with science today, no doubt. With all the knowledge we’ve accumulated about the Universe, from the smallest subatomic scales to the farthest recesses of deep space, there are still realms and regimes where our best theories fail, where the predictions and the data don’t match, and where no known explanation is sufficient for the phenomena that shows up. Image credit: The Michelson-Morley interferometer, via University of Virginia. But this is where all the potential for scientific growth lives. Believe it or not, one of […] Read More