Activity Feed (Beta Version: 9.11.2.0)

Hi. Just because we study the Sun does not mean we know much about solar sails! It has been a couple days, though, and no-one has replied, so I will j...

3/24/2021

Terry Kucerareplied to: RE: inside the sun

Hi. In the core of the Sun energy is produced by what is called nuclear fusion - the extreme pressures at the sun's core are enough to push atoms to...

3/24/2021

Terry Kucerareplied to: RE: Sun history

Hi, One historical event solar physicists talk about a lot is the Carrington Event in 1859. This is the first solar flare observed by humans. It was ...

3/24/2021

Terry Kucerareplied to: RE: Sun brightness changes?

Hi Rohit, The sun's total over all brightness changes a very, very small amount - about 0.1% over the course of the eleven solar cycle. That is such ...

3/24/2021

Terry Kucerareplied to: RE: navigation

On the ground you can use the Sun to navigate - the location of the Sun in the sky is something that is know as a function of time and location. A sim...

3/22/2021

Terry Kucerareplied to: RE: Magnetism on the Sun

Hi, The first person to actually measure the magnetic field of the Sun was George Ellery Hale, who measured the strong magnetic fields in sunspots fr...

3/22/2021

Terry Kucerareplied to: RE: Sun missions?

Yes, For instance there is a NASA sponsored mission the works called PUNCH which will study CMEs and the Solar Wind. It is scheduled to launch in 20...

3/22/2021

Terry Kucerareplied to: RE: solar activity

No, just some of it. One of the tricky aspects of space weather prediction is figuring out which events are likely to affect us and how. Things li...

10/16/2020

Terry Kucerareplied to: RE: covid-19 challenges

I have been working from home since March. I can do everything I need to do from here on the computer, and we have a lot of video conferencing and su...

10/15/2020

Terry Kucerareplied to: RE: Longest eclipse?

Hi, I don't know about the longest ever, but the longest total solar eclipse for this century already happened - it was six minutes and 39 seconds ...

10/15/2020

Terry Kucerareplied to: RE: sun cause space weather?

Hi Raja, Yes, indeed it does. Things happening at the Sun like flares (bright explosions near the Sun's surface), coronal mass ejections (giant c...

10/15/2020

Terry Kucerareplied to: RE: gravity

Hi, The Sun does actually have tidal affects on the Earth, but they are smaller than the ones from the Moon. Although the Sun's gravitational pull...

10/15/2020

Terry Kucerareplied to: RE: Winter sun

Hi, This a big questions that seems like it might be related to changes in the Sun but is really about the way the Earth is tilted towards or away ...

10/15/2020

Terry Kucerareplied to: RE: Shadows

Kind of - the exact direction of your shadow depends on the time of day, the time of year and how far you are from the equator, because the location o...

10/13/2020

Terry Kucerareplied to: RE: pluto & the sun

Hi. Fun question! That depends on what kind of assumptions you make (if you crammed all those Plutos together they might smoosh together in wierd w...

10/12/2020

Terry Kucerareplied to: RE: Sun/Mercury

Yes, its sounds really strange, doesn't it? The places where there is thought to be ice on Mercury are craters near the poles where the Sun never sh...

10/12/2020

Terry Kucerareplied to: RE: What color is the sun?

Hi, The sun gives out a whole range of colors, which ends up meaning it is effectively white. White is what you get when you combine all the colors ...

3/27/2020

Terry Kucerareplied to: RE: Sun's fuel/energy

If you are asking about the fuel the powers the Sun in its core - that is hydrogen combining to form helium and energy in a process called nuclear fu...

3/25/2020

Terry Kucerareplied to: RE: How heavy is the sun?

Hi, The Sun has a mass of 1.989 x 10^30 kilograms That means 1.98 times a 1 with 30 zeros after it (a trillion trillion million). That is a lot! Th...

3/25/2020

Terry Kucerareplied to: RE: What is at the center of the sun?

Hi, The sun is mostly made up of hydrogen the lightest of all the elements. In the center of the sun, the sun's core, the pressures are so high from ...

3/24/2020