Latest Hinode Stories

Whilst the most powerful earthquake since records began hit Japan in 2011, triggering a massive tsunami which devastated much of the country, space scientists involved in one of the 'brightest' international Sun missions continued working tirelessly at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in Sagamihara, Japan, to capture new data from our turbulent star. These latest Hinode results, to be discussed in a meeting at the University of St Andrews this week (Tuesday 14 August),...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Scientists are using Doppler techniques that may be able to take predicting space weather to a new level and understanding. An international team of researchers have combined Doppler techniques with images and data from a space-based telescope to observe loops of 1,800,000-degree Fahrenheit plasma flowing up from the sun's surface at more than 12 miles per second. These loops arch over the sun, and may be the first signs of trouble...

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online An international team of scientists have for the first time captured and identified images of an upward surge of the Sun’s gases into quiescent coronal loops, a discovery that provides one more step in the understanding of the origins of extreme storms in outer space, which are known to wreak havoc on satellite systems and power grids here on Earth. University of Cambridge researchers worked with colleagues from the India and...

On May 20-21, 2012 an annular eclipse of the Sun will be visible from within a narrow corridor along Earth's northern Hemisphere -- beginning in eastern Asia, crossing the North Pacific Ocean, and ending in the western United States. A partial eclipse will be visible from a much larger region covering East Asia, North Pacific, North America and Greenland. During an annular eclipse the moon does not block the entirety of the sun, but leaves a bright ring of light visible at the edges. For...

Approximately every 11 years the magnetic field on the sun reverses completely – the north magnetic pole switches to south, and vice versa. It's as if a bar magnet slowly lost its magnetic field and regained it in the opposite direction, so the positive side becomes the negative side. But, of course, the sun is not a simple bar magnet and the causes of the switch, not to mention the complex tracery of moving magnetic fields throughout the eleven-year cycle, are not easy to map out....

PALO ALTO, Calif., Jan. 19, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- In a paper to be published tomorrow in the journal Science, for the first time ever scientists at the Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory (LMSAL) at the Advanced Technology Center (ATC) in Palo Alto, and collaborators at other institutions, have reported observations and analysis of the final death throes of a comet, as it passed across the face of the Sun on July 6, 2011, to vanish in flight. Using...

[ Watch the Video ] Comets are icy and fragile. They spend most of their time orbiting through the dark outskirts of the solar system safe from destructive rays of intense sunlight.  The deepest cold is their natural habitat. Last November amateur astronomer Terry Lovejoy discovered a different kind of comet.  The icy fuzzball he spotted in the sky over his backyard observatory in Australia was heading almost directly for the sun.  On Dec. 16th, less than three weeks after he found...

[ Watch the Video ] Australian astronomer Terry Lovejoy spotted a Kreutz family comet by using a ground-based telescope for the first time since the 1970s. Lovejoy announced he discovered C/2011 W3, or comet Lovejoy, from the ground on December 2, 2011. NASA's Solar Heliophysics Observatory (SOHO) has spotted over 2100 comets, most of which are from the Kreutz family.  This family of comets graze the solar atmosphere where they usually evaporate completely. Discovering a comet...

PALO ALTO, Calif., Dec. 8, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Dr. Alan M. Title, physicist at the Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) Space Systems Advanced Technology Center (ATC) in Palo Alto, was honored last evening with the 2011 John Adam Fleming Medal, at a ceremony at the 2011 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. The Fleming Medal is awarded not more than once annually to an individual "for original research and technical leadership in geomagnetism, atmospheric...

On October 28, 2006, the Hinode solar mission was at last ready. The spacecraft launched on September 22, but such missions require a handful of diagnostics before the instruments can be turned on and collect what is called "first light." Hopes were high. Hinode had the potential to provide some of the highest resolution images of the sun the world had ever seen -- as well as help solve such mysteries as why the sun's atmosphere is a thousand times hotter than its surface and how the...