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Nasa the end of the sun4/25/2023 ![]() Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., made and monitored one of the two exposed tools on the spacecraft. So how did they do it without turning Parker into Icarus? At 6.5 million miles from the sun’s surface, though, that’s the closest anything has come to the fiery orb, according to NASA.īuilding instruments that could withstand the scorching heat without disintegrating - and continue taking measurements - was an engineering feat. The Parker Solar Probe flew into the star’s corona, which is its outermost atmosphere, in April. ![]() "All these things are what we see as space weather effects," Pesnell told Live Science: "harming our satellites, radiation doses to astronauts, satellite drag - all the effects that we worry about from the sun.A NASA probe has become the first spacecraft to “touch” the sun, traveling into a region where the temperature is a spicy 2 million degrees-Fahrenheit. ![]() Satellites in low-Earth orbits can suffer increased drag when the outer layers of the atmosphere are heated by solar activity, which can result in their orbits decaying more quickly an increase in solar radiation can affect astronauts outside the Earth's protective magnetic field. ![]() The charged particle from proton storms and coronal mass ejections can also create vivid auroras above the Earth. (Image credit: NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory)Īll three types of events can result in disruption to our communications, aircraft navigation and power grids, said solar physicist Dean Pesnell of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, the project scientist for the Solar Dynamics Observatory. The SC25 cycle is now expected to reach a peak in about 2024, before declining to a new minimum in about 2031, according to a prediction by the Space Weather Prediction Center.īut "certainly in 2020 there are still many spotless days ahead and solar activity will remain very-low to low," Janssens said.Ī close-up of one of the new sunspot regions on the sun - one of the first seen after a string of 40 "spotless" days that may correspond to the solar minimum between two 11-year sunspot cycles. The new spots also occurred at a relatively high latitude in the northern and southern hemispheres of the sun - between 25 and 30 degrees from the equator - while sunspots of the old cycle popped up within a few degrees of the equator, he said. Sunspots from the new and old cycles can overlap by months or even years, Janssens said, but the new ones can be distinguished as members of the new SC25 cycle by their magnetic polarity - the reverse of the old SC24 cycle. But the sun's rotating magnetic field slowly gets tangled again, and the sunspot cycle begins anew. The sun's change in polarity causes its magnetic activity - and its sunspots - to eventually die down, resulting in a solar minimum. Sunspots from the new cycle SC25 will occur with reversed polarity closer to the poles of the sun, while sunspots from the old cycle SC24 can still occur near the sun's equator. That's a bit as if the Earth switched its north and its south magnetic poles every few years. That makes the sun's powerful magnetic fields become progressively more "tangled" - and its sunspots and other magnetic activity more violent - until the entire star reverses its magnetic polarity (sort of like electric charge, but in this case, the state is either north or south). As the star rotates roughly once every 27 days, its material acts like a fluid, so that its equator rotates much faster than its poles do. The 11-year sunspot cycles are caused by the sun's rotation in space, according to NASA. Though scientists won't have enough data for another six months to declare the start of a new sunspot cycle, "This seems to indicate that SC25 is gradually shaping up and that we are or have passed the solar cycle minimum," Janssens said. Such prolonged periods without sunspots usually happen around the time of what's called the "solar minimum" - the time of lowest sunspot activity between two solar cycles, Janssens said. (Image credit: NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory) (opens in new tab) 24 - one in the sun's northern hemisphere and one in the southern hemisphere, shown here circled in red. The instruments onboard NASA's orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory captured imagery of the two sunspots from the new sunspot cycle on Dec.
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