According to ABC Science.
A team of astronomers have found the ‘missing link’ of stellar death, revealing what our Sun might look like at the end of its life.
The group of Australian and US astronomers, led by Associate Professor Miroslav Filipovic of the University of Western Sydney, call the new class of object ’super planetary nebulae’.
They report on their finding in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Large stars typically end their life in a massive explosion of energy known as a supernova. Small stars end with a much smaller blast of gas and dust, known as planetary nebulae.
Planetary nebulae had only been detected around stars with a mass of between 30% and 60% that of the Sun. As a result, little was known as to what happened to average-sized star, such as our Sun.
…well ok it’s not actually a rainbow. It’s a freak of nature.
According to DailyMail.com
“Rather than being caused by raindrops, it is the result of freak atmospheric conditions rarely seen outside the North and South Poles.
While normal rainbows are formed when light penetrates raindrops and emerges on the other side without changing direction, the smile is formed when sunlight shines through millions of tiny ice crystals in cirrus and cirrus stratus clouds.
Because the crystals are flat and hexagonal, they invert the light and create an upside-down curve called a circumzenithal arc.
The phenomenon relies on the sun being low in the sky, normally less than 32 degrees from the horizon.
The arcs can appear at any time of the year, hovering in the sky only fleetingly because clouds tend to move quickly near the zenith.”
“Scientists in California say they’re trying to replicate the power of the sun by firing laser beams at a tiny pellet of hydrogen.
Physicists at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore say the nuclear fusion experiments may offer the world a clean source of energy, The Times of London reported Sunday.
The hydrogen pellet will be hit with 192 laser beams capable of generating 500 trillion watts — 1,000 times the power of the U.S. national grid, said the scientists.”
It’s not enough we have to worry about extreme weather, we now have to worry about extreme solar space storms. There is historical proof that this type of storm could happen, and it would affect our electricity, cell phones and even our water supply. In 1859, a solar eruption caused telegraph lines to burn up. As we are nearing a period of active solar storms, it is possible this type of thing could happen again. Read more…
Here’s a photograph that three University of Toronto scientists were able to capture images of the star 1RXS J160929.1-210524 from a distance of about 500 light years away. This image is making history as the first ever photograph of a planet in an alien solar system around a sun-like star.
This photograph will challenge currently accepted theories about star and planet formation because the “planet” is quite a distance from its parent star.
Here is a fact that is generally agreed on by scientists: the sun is constantly growing and expanding. “Hey great, more beach days,” you may think. Well in the future (we’re talking several billions of years, but still) this growth could cause the sun to obliterate the earth, making it an uninhabitable, hot, brown mass (talk about global warming). But, maybe not. See what the scientists have to say…
Solar eclipses have been blamed in the past for war, famine, and the deaths of kings. But the upcoming total eclipse on August 1 will mostly be celebrated by excited sky-watchers—even if it won’t break any records.
The sun will be completely obscured for just under two and a half minutes, “a tad on the short side,” according to astrophysicist Fred Espenak, an eclipse expert based at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
A typical eclipse lasts for three minutes, Espenak said, and the longest possible is seven and a half minutes. Read more…
According to Anne Minard
An artist’s impression shows the trio of super-Earths discovered by a European team and announced on June 16, 2008.
The three planets are 4.2, 6.7, and 9.4 times more massive than Earth and orbit the star HD 40307 every 4.3, 9.6, and 20.4 days, respectively.
According to Anne Minard
HONG KONG - With rising demand for solar energy in Europe and the United States, China-based Suntech Power Holdings is expected to increase its profit by 75% and become the world’s No. 1 solar module manufacturer in 2008.
In a research report published Wednesday, Citigroup projected that Suntech Power would become the largest supplier of photovoltaic cells and modules in the world this year, with year-end capacity of 1 gigawatt, almost double the production scale it had in 2007. Headquartered in Wuxi, an industrial city in the coastal province of Jiangsu, Suntech was ranked the world’s No. 3 solar module producer in 2007, with annual capacity of 540 megawatts.
Citigroup estimated Suntech’s sales would grow 53%, to $2.06 billion, in 2008, from $1.3 billion last year. Net profit is forecast to soar by 75%, to $299.5 million, this year, up from the $171.3 million recorded in 2007.
Suntech has been expanding rapidly in the past few years. It was established in 2001 and listed on New York Stock Exchange in December 2005. With four production sites in Wuxi, Luoyang (in Henan province), Qinghai province and Shanghai, Suntech is currently the No. 2 photovoltaic module supplier in Germany, the world’s largest solar market, which accounted 50% of Suntech’s sales in 2007.
Citigroup forecast a favorable outlook for China’s solar industry generally, with strong demand growth in Spain, Italy, South Korea and potentially the United States, as well as solid demand from Germany, driven by increased adoption of solar incentives by governments worldwide as a matter of policy. Nevertheless, Citigroup expected the present undersupply of solar polysilicon will continue only through 2008. “By second half in 2009 and entering 2010, a significant increase in new polysilicon capacity would likely cause industry oversupply, resulting in a potential industry cyclical correction which could drive down both polysilicon and module prices.” Citigroup anticipated that the industry will be 33% oversupplied by 2010.
Amid fierce competition in the solar industry, the bank chose Suntech as its top pick in the field, the most capable of weathering the coming market correction: “We believe Suntech is among the best positioned in the sector, given its leading scale, low-cost China manufacturing and roadmap for improved cell efficiency.” Citigroup initiated coverage on Suntech with a “buy/ high risk” rating, setting a target price of $55.
Shares of Suntech Power Holdings (nyse: STP - news - people ) sprinted ahead 10.2%, or $3.73, to $40.68, on Wall Street Tuesday, rebounding from a deep drop last week. The company disclosed last week that recent severe snowstorms, which caused electricity shortages and transportation chaos in China, had curbed production and shipments for the company, making it difficult to meet growing demand. The solar company announced last Wednesday that its fourth-quarter earnings soared 60.8%. Even so, this result underperformed Wall Street’s expectations, triggering a fall in its shares by as much 23%, to $36.00, the biggest drop since trading in it began in December 2005.
According to Vivian Wai-yin Kwok on www.forbes.com
X-ray images taken from a new international spacecraft show that the sun’s magnetic field is much more turbulent than scientists knew, NASA reported Wednesday.
They saw twisting plumes of gas rising from the sun’s corona and reacting with the star’s magnetic field, a process that releases energy and may power solar storms and coronal mass ejections, which in turn affect the Earth. A turbulent magnetic field would, in theory, generate more energy than a steady-state field.
“Theorists suggested that twisted, tangled magnetic fields might exist,” Leon Golub, senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a statement.
“With the X-Ray Telescope, we can see them clearly for the first time.”
The spacecraft, named Hinode from the Japanese word for sunrise, was launched in September with an array of carefully designed instruments, each looking at a different layer of the sun.
It is a joint project of the U.S., European and Japanese space agencies and Britain’s Particle Physics Astronomy Research Council.
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