Category Astronomy/Space

Astronomers identified a nearby star whose sunspot cycles appear to have stopped. Studying this star might help explain the unusual period from the mid 1600s to the early 1700s when our Sun paused its sunspot cycles.

The number of sunspots on our Sun typically ebbs and flows in a predictable 11-year cycle, but one unusual 70-year period when sunspots were incredibly rare has mystified s...

Solar prominences are large magnetic structures confining a cool and dense plasma in the hot solar corona. Typically, the prominence plasma is 100 times cooler and denser than its coronal surroundings. This phenomenon raises some important questions about the origin of the prominence plasma, and the energy and force equilibria which allow it to remain in the corona for a relatively long time.

The prominence contains many fine structures, including prominence bubble and dark upflow plumes. However, the nature of prominence bubbles remains controversial and the detailed formation mechanism of dark upflow plumes is not clear.

A research team led by Dr. Wang Jincheng, Prof...

Asteroids hold many clues about the formation and evolution of planets and their satellites. Understanding their history can, therefore, reveal much about our solar system. While observations made from a distance using electromagnetic waves and telescopes are useful, analyzing samples retrieved from asteroids can yield much more detail about their characteristics and how they may have formed. An endeavor in this direction was the Hayabusa mission, which, in 2010, returned to Earth after 7 years with samples from the asteroid Itokawa.

The successor to this mission, called Hayabusa2, was completed near the end of 2020, bringing back material from Asteroid 162173 “Ryugu,” along with a collection of images and data gathered remotely from close proximity...