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How accurate do you expect your local weather report to be? Honestly, I'll believe their predictions up to 48 hours, but anything beyond that is pushing it. Now it looks like our ability to predict sunspots is now at that same level, giving us valuable warning time for people in space, and infrastructure on the ground. More »
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Scientists have know for a while that the core of a sunspot is invariably darker than the area around it. It's also much cooler than the rest of the sun's surface. But why? New research published in Science picks apart the cause, and provides some gorgeous sunspot images in the process. More »
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This video from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory tracks five new sunspots as they twist and turn on the Sun's surface. Amazingly, all of these sunspots are bigger than the Earth and have more energy than a million nuclear bombs. More »
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This is the clearest, most detailed image of a sunspot ever taken in visible light. These ultra-magnetic structures are thought to be crucial to potentially Earth-threatening space weather, and it's photos like these that will help us better understand the risk. More »
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Sunspots have returned at last, after a worryingly dormant solar minimum. To celebrate, here are four current solar pictures from NASA's Solar And Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). They're the sun at 304 Angstrom, 171 Angstrom, 195 Angstrom and 204 Angstrom. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5367992&view=rss&microfeed=true NASA channels Warhol in these ultraviolet images of the sun, posted today. The non-artistic reason for the differing color spectrums is to show off a reversed-polarity sunspot, on the left. This sunspot marks the end of another cycle of waxing and waning solar flares, meaning the sun will begin climbing towards Solar Max, which it will reach in 2011 or 2012. Sidenote: wouldn't Solar Max be a good superhero name? More »
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