Tuesday 4 March 2014

Sun and Prominence

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Dramatic prominences can sometimes be seen looming just beyond the edge of the sun. Such was the case last week as a large prominence, visible above, highlighted a highly active recent Sun. A waving sea of hot gas is visible in the foreground chromosphere in great detail as it was imaged in one specific color of light emitted by hydrogen. A solar prominence is a cloud of solar gas held just above the surface by the Sun's magnetic field. The Earth, illustrated in the inset, is smaller than the prominence. Although very hot, prominences typically appear dark when viewed against the Sun, since they are slightly cooler than the photosphere below them. A quiescent prominence typically lasts about a month, and may erupt in a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) expelling hot gas into the Solar System, some of which may strike the Earth and trigger auroras.
Tomorrow's picture: colorful space chicken
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(Phys.org) —A new twist on a very old physics technique could have a profound impact on one of the most buzzed-about aspects of nanoscience.



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(Phys.org) —Sixteen years ago two teams of supernova hunters, one led by Saul Perlmutter of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), the other by Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University, declared that the expansion of the universe is accelerating – a Nobel Prize-winning discovery tantamount to the discovery of dark energy. Both teams measured how fast the universe was expanding at different times in its history by comparing the brightnesses and redshifts of Type Ia supernovae, the best cosmological "standard candles."



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