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The sun

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Solar flares made in the lab could teach us about the real thing

We don't fully understand how the sun spits out high-energy particles during a solar flare, so researchers have created a miniature version in the lab

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Dazzlingly detailed photo of a record solar tornado '14 Earths tall'

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Andrew McCarthy and Jason Guenzel 140 megapixel image of the sun

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Northern lights: The best pictures of the aurora taken across the UK

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Northern lights, aurora borealis, over Fort William, Scotland, on 27 February 2023
An extensive erupting prominence taken on 15 May, 2001 -- Prominences are huge clouds of relatively cool dense plasma suspended in the Sun's hot, thin corona. At times, they can erupt, escaping the Sun's atmosphere. Emission in this spectral line of EIT 304? shows the upper chromosphere at a temperature of about 60,000 degrees K. The hottest areas appear almost white, while the darker red areas indicate cooler temperatures.

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Sunquakes may be caused by weird beams of electrons from solar flares

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A solar storm

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Solar storms may cause up to 5500 heart-related deaths in a given year

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Diffractive solar sails, depicted in this conceptual illustration, could enable missions to hard-to-reach places, like orbits over the Sun?s poles. Credits: MacKenzi Martin

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NASA awards $2 million to advance rainbow-coloured solar sail project

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An artistic impression of the high-frequency retrograde (HFR) vorticity waves. These waves appear as swirling motions near the equator of the Sun. The rotation in the north is always anti-symmetric to the rotation in the southern hemisphere. These mysterious waves move in the opposite direction to the sun's rotation, which is to the right, three times faster then what is allowed by hydrodynamics alone.

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Strange waves in the sun are travelling far faster than they should be

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Parker Solar Probe near the sun

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NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is the first spacecraft to 'touch' the sun

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On August 31, 2012 a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun's atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space at 4:36 p.m. EDT. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled at over 900 miles per second. The CME did not travel directly toward Earth, but did connect with Earth's magnetic environment, or magnetosphere, causing aurora to appear on the night of Monday, September 3. Picuted here is a lighten blended version of the 304 and 171 angstrom wavelengths. Cropped Credit: NASA/GSFC/SDO NASA image use policy. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA???s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA???s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency???s mission. Follow us on Twitter Like us on Facebook Find us on Instagram

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Monster cloud of plasma spotted spewing out of a distant star

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Mysterious origin of Earth's water may be explained by solar wind

Evidence from asteroids shows that charged particles from the sun can turn dust grains into water – a process that could be useful for space exploration too

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Planet Earth and Sun. Elements of this image furnished by NASA.

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Partial solar eclipse will be visible in the UK and Ireland on 10 June

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NASA's Parker Solar Probe has gone faster than any spacecraft ever

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Sun's bumpy magnetic fields might explain why its atmosphere is so hot

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Technology

Water could be extracted from desert air using heat from sunlight

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