Reckless Reality |

A lack of sunspots and solar flares has made the Sun its dimmest for nearly a century, claim scientists.

The Sun normally undergoes an 11-year cycle of activity.

At its peak, it has a tumultuous boiling atmosphere that spits out flares and planet-sized chunks of super-hot gas. This is followed by a calmer period.

Last year, it was expected that it would have been hotting up after a quiet spell. But instead it hit a 50-year low in solar wind pressure, a 55-year low in radio emissions, and a 100-year low in sunspot activity. Read the rest of this entry »

The crust of neutron stars is 10 billion times stronger than steel, according to new simulations. That makes the surface of these ultra-dense stars tough enough to support long-lived bulges that could produce gravitational waves detectable by experiments on Earth.

Neutron stars are the cores left behind when relatively massive stars explode in supernovae. They are incredibly dense, packing about as much mass as the sun into a sphere just 20 kilometres or so across, and some rotate hundreds of times per second.

Because of their extreme gravity and rotational speed, neutron stars could potentially make large ripples in the fabric of space – but only if their surfaces contain bumps or other imperfections that would make them asymmetrical. Read the rest of this entry »

Pluto’s status nowadays as a so-called plutoid and former planet may be official in the latest textbooks, but someone forgot to tell the astronomers.

A panel of six of them gathered here last Tuesday to debate the former ninth planet’s status at the American Museum of Natural History, along with moderator Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Public interest in poor Pluto has peaked ever since the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto from planet status in 2006. And it became clear at the museum event that fierce disagreement still exists among top scientists at the leading edge of the debate. Read the rest of this entry »

Saturn has given scientists a light show like nothing they’ve ever seen, NASA announced Wednesday.

The Cassini orbiter has captured a unique aurora (shown in blue) on the ringed planet that illuminates much of its northern polar cap.

Auroras occur when charged particles stream across a planet’s magnetic field lines and into its atmosphere.

But they don’t usually light up such a wide area.

“It’s not just a ring of auroras like those we’ve seen at Jupiter or Earth,” Tom Stallard, a scientist at the University of Leichester, U.K., said in a statement. He added that “finding such a bright aurora here is a fantastic surprise.” Read the rest of this entry »