VOYAGER DISCOVERS MAGNETIC FROTH: NASA's Voyager probes have reached the edge of the solar system and found something surprising there--a froth of magnetic bubbles separating us from the rest of the galaxy. Get the full story from Science@NASA.
WAITING FOR IMPACT: The CME from Tuesday's magnificent flare still hasn't reached Earth. NOAA forecasters haven't given up, though. They estimate a 20% to 30% chance that the cloud may yet deliver a glancing blow to our planet's magnetic field and spark geomagnetic storms during the next 24 hours. High latitude sky watchers should remain alert for auroras. Aurora alerts: voice, text.
While you're waiting, watch the eruption one more time:
Credit: NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.
"It looks like someone kicked a clod of dirt in the air," says solar physicist C. Alex Young of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in a Youtube video. "I've never seen material released in this way before--an amazing, amazing event."
Much of the plasma thrown up by the blast simply fell back to the sun--indeed, that's what makes the footage so dramatic. In the movies you can see blobs of hot gas as large as Earth making bright splashes where they hit the stellar surface. Some plasma, however, reached escape velocity and left the sun in the form of a coronal mass ejection: movie.
NANOSAIL-D IN BRIGHT TWILIGHT: NASA's Nanosail-D, the first solar sail to orbit Earth, is catching the attention of evening sky watchers. "I saw it on June 3rd in bright evening twilight (sun at -7 degrees altitude)," reports Marco Langbroek of Leiden, the Netherlands. "The sky was still light blue, with the first stars visible. NanoSail-D became very bright, flashing periodically to mag. 0 with a slightly variable flash interval of 1.2 - 1.5 seconds." Look below the snapshot for a time history of the sail's brightness:
Because high-resolution photography of the small sail is so challenging, mission scientists can't be 100% sure how NanoSail-D is oriented or why it is flashing. Probably it is tumbling, with glints of sunlight producing quiasi-periodic "solar sail flares." NanoSail-D will be strobing across the evening skies of Europe and North America this week. Check the Simple Satellite Tracker or your cell phone for flyby times.
Provided by Space Weather News
