What happens in the event horizon stays in the event horizon
Seen from Hai Duong, Vietnam, the bright sun sports a rainbow-colored halo in a picture taken September 17.
The circle of color is an optical effect created as ice crystals in high-altitude clouds refract, or bend, light. Because the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere are almost always below freezing, sun halos and related phenomena—such as sun dogs and pillars—can be seen year-round, according to NASA.
Photograph by Tho Le Duc
via National Geographic
Some amazing photographs of the solar eclipse on January 4th, 2011, as seen from Turku, Finland:
Photos by Tapani Isomaki
via Universe Today
Take a look at this huge eruptive prominence spotted today:
Boom!
(No worries — this solar flare poses no threat to Earth.)
Credit: NASA, SDO AIA
via Phil Plait
Alan Friedman captured this mind-blowing image of the Sun, complete with the massive remnants of an eruptive prominence, at the Winter Star Party on West Summerland Key in Florida last week:
Ah, something from my side of the world! This is quite a sundog! And perhaps this shot is even more impressive considering that, at this time of year, actually getting a glimpse of the Sun, much less a picture, is a feat in itself.
From NASA APOD:
What’s happened to the Sun? Sometimes it looks like the Sun is being viewed through a large lens. In the above case, however, there are actually millions of lenses: ice crystals. As water freezes in the upper atmosphere, small, flat, six-sided, ice crystals might be formed. As these crystals flutter to the ground, much time is spent with their faces flat, parallel to the ground. An observer may pass through the same plane as many of the falling ice crystals near sunrise or sunset. During this alignment, each crystal can act like a miniature lens, refracting sunlight into our view and creating phenomena like parhelia, the technical term for sundogs. The above image was taken last year in Stockholm, Sweden. Visible in the image center is the Sun, while two bright sundogs glow prominently from both the left and the right. Also visible is the bright 22 degree halo — as well as the rarer and much fainter 46 degree halo — also created by sunlight reflecting off of atmospheric ice crystals.
Credit: Peter Rosén
The picture above wasn’t taken out of a movie adaptation of a J.R.R. Tolkien story. No, in fact it is a very detailed image of a sunspot taken by New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Big Bear Solar Observatory. That only leaves me slightly more disconcerted.
This artistic montage of our solar system — 30,000 pixels wide, 18MB in size — might be the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time:
It’s not scientifically correct, to be sure, but awe-inspiring nonetheless. To think this is but one solar system in a universe where there are more stars than grains of sand on all of the beaches on Earth!
In this picture (click for full size), the Sun, which is 109 times larger than the Earth, represents only a single pixel. Think about that for a second. Now consider that the largest star shown, VY Canis Majoris, isn’t even the most massive we know of; that title belongs to R136a1, a star that shines 10 million times brighter than the Sun and has a surface temperature of roughly 40,000 degrees celsius. Incomprehensible.
I wonder what these celestial monstrosities would be to those of our ancestors who thought a god of our little pixel.
From NASA APOD:
During a total solar eclipse, the Sun’s extensive outer atmosphere, or corona, is an inspirational sight. Subtle shades and shimmering features that engage the eye span a brightness range of over 10,000 to 1, making them notoriously difficult to capture in a single photograph. But this composite of 7 consecutive digital images over a range of exposure times comes close to revealing the crown of the Sun in all its glory. The telescopic views were recorded from the Isla de Pascua (Easter Island) during July 11′s total solar eclipse and also show solar prominences extending just beyond the edge of the eclipsed sun. Remarkably, features on the dim, near side of the New Moon can also be made out, illuminated by sunlight reflected from a Full Earth.
Credit: Alain Maury and Jean-Luc Dauvergne
There’s a good chance that solar flares will send large amounts of magnetic energy our way soon — “sometime around 2013″ (let’s ignore that the popular doomsday, December 21st 2012, falls within that time frame). This solar storm could knock out power grids, GPS navigation, air travel, financial services and emergency radio communications — well, anything sensitive to electromagnetic disturbance.
Normally, I’d be more than a tad skeptical, but here’s what Richard Fisher of NASA’s Heliophysics Division has to say:
The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity. At the same time, our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms. The intersection of these two issues is what we’re getting together to discuss.
The Telegraph elaborates:
Every 22 years the Sun’s magnetic energy cycle peaks while the number of sun spots – or flares – hits a maximum level every 11 years. Dr Fisher, a Nasa scientist for 20 years, said these two events would combine in 2013 to produce huge levels of radiation. He said large swathes of the world could face being without power for several months, although he admitted that was unlikely. A more likely scenario was that large areas, including northern Europe and Britain which have “fragile” power grids, would be without power and access to electronic devices for hours, possibly even days.
Of course, the important question here is whether the iPad is resistant to these solar storms, or if such technology — let’s call it ‘Flare Guard’ — will be introduced through a software update to the Retina Display at a later stage. I’ve reached out to Steve Jobs for a comment, but have not yet received a response.