Tag Archives: Suns

IN A NUTSHELL 🌌 Astronomers discovered a massive molecular cloud in the Milky Way, weighing as much as 160,000 suns. 🔭 The Green Bank Telescope played a key role in identifying this cloud, located 23,000 light-years away. ⭐ Giant Molecular Clouds are essential for understanding star formation and galactic evolution. 🛰️ Future observations could reveal more about the mechanisms behind …

The massive “Cosmic Horseshoe” galaxy system likely hosts a colossal black hole measuring 36 billion times the mass of our sun — one of the largest ever seen in the universe, a new study finds. Scientists found the cosmic monster by peering through a halo of light called an “Einstein ring,” which is a kind of gravitational lens. Lensing happens …

Devices (artist’s illustration) kept aloft by sunlight could take sensors into an understudied layer of the atmosphere.Credit: Schafer et al. Nature (2025) Theory and mathematics said his device would fly. But Ben Schafer was still pleasantly surprised the first time he flipped a switch and watched the centimetre-square device his team had built levitate, if only for a moment before …

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has delivered its closest and most detailed view yet of the Sun’s atmosphere, revealing the chaotic origins of the solar wind and space weather events that ripple across the solar system. The findings, based on a historic flyby in December 2024, reported by SciTechDaily, are reshaping scientists’ understanding of how the Sun’s activity can disrupt satellites, …

A rare hurricane that raged high above Earth’s North Pole in 2014 packed a surprising punch, and may be even stranger than scientists first thought. The phenomenon, called a “space hurricane,” unleashed intense space weather effects normally seen only during major solar storms, despite the sun being unusually quiet that day, according to a new study. The report offers the …

The sun never sits still, yet until recently our best snapshots blurred its fine threads. Now an image set from the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope on Haleakalā resolves details just 20 kilometers wide, letting researchers watch bright and dark stripes move across the solar surface. “We investigate the fine-scale structure of the solar surface for the first time with …

A study analyzing data from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has uncovered evidence of a “helicity barrier” in the Sun’s atmosphere. In 2018, NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe on a trajectory that would eventually have it dive into the Sun’s atmosphere (corona), getting seven times closer to our host star than any other spacecraft so far. In June 2025, the …

NASA had a special Christmas gift last year. On December 24, the Parker Solar Probe reached the closest it will ever get to the Sun. As it flew just 6.1 million kilometers (3.8 million miles) from its surface, it snapped a picture of the solar wind, the stream of particles that is released from the Sun, which can travel at …

About 5 billion light-years away from where you’re sitting, in one of the most massive galaxies on record, there exists an astonishing black hole. It was only just measured by scientists who managed to peer through the fabric of warped space-time — and it appears to hold a mass equivalent to that of 36 billion suns. Yes, billion. “This is …

IN A NUTSHELL 🌌 Researchers have developed a new method using soft X-rays to measure the reconnection rate of solar wind energy into Earth’s magnetosphere. 🔬 The team used Japan’s Fugaku supercomputer to simulate coronal mass ejections and analyzed V-shaped X-ray emissions from a Moon-distance perspective. 🌎 This approach bridges the gap between local observations and global reconnection rates, offering …