James Webb Space Telescope Breathtaking 4K Views Of Rho Ophiuchi
The James Webb Space Telescope's look at the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex. The image showcase a "small star-forming region" within the complex that lies about 390 light-years away. Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA, ESA, CSA, JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA, DSS2, N. Bartmann (ESA/Webb), E. Slawik, N. Risinger, D. de Martin, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb), K. Pontoppidan (STScI), A. Pagan (STScI) | edited by Space.com's Steve Spaleta Music: In Stillness by Gavin Luke / courtesy of Epidemic Sound
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7 hours ago
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World's first images of the sun's south pole spark 'a new era of solar science'
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Just this once, it's OK to stare at the sun — provided you're looking at the European Space Agency's (ESA) newly released, history-making images of the solar south pole. Taken near the sun on March 23 and revealed to Earthlings Wednesday (June 11), the new images from ESA's Solar Orbiter show a view of our star that no human or spacecraft has ever recorded before. While Earth and the other planets orbit relatively in line with the sun's equator on an invisible plane called the ecliptic, Solar Orbiter spent the last several months tilting its orbit to 17 degrees below the solar equator — bringing our star's enigmatic south pole into view for the first time ever. "Today we reveal humankind's first-ever views of the Sun's pole," Carole Mundell, ESA's director of science, said in a statement. "These new unique views from our Solar Orbiter mission are the beginning of a new era of solar science." The new images capture the solar pole in a broad swath of visible and ultraviolet wavelengths, using three of Solar Orbiter's 10 onboard instruments. The result is a colorful confetti of solar data, including an unprecedented look at the perplexing tangles of the sun's magnetic field as it prepares to flip, and the high-velocity movements of specific chemical elements as they ride plumes of plasma that make up the solar wind — the constant stream of charged particles that governs space weather throughout our solar system. These data will help improve our understanding of the solar wind, space weather and the sun's roughly 11-year activity cycle for years to come, according to ESA. But of particular interest right now, as the sun spits out flares in overdrive during its period of peak activity (called solar maximum), are the magnetic measurements taken with Solar Orbiter's Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) instrument. Related: NASA spacecraft snaps eerie image of eclipsed sun with an extra moon overhead. What's going on? PHI's maps of the solar magnetic field highlight an intriguing paradox: While most magnets have a distinct north and south pole, the sun's south pole is roiling with both north and south polarity magnetic fields (shown as blue and red patches in the corresponding images). According to ESA, this mess of magnetism is a temporary phenomenon that hints that the sun's magnetic field is about to flip, as it does once every 11 years or so. This magnetic reversal signifies the end of the high-activity solar maximum and begins a transition toward the relative calm of the next solar minimum. When the next minimum begins, approximately five to six years from now, the sun's poles should show only one type of magnetic polarity apiece as our star takes a break from launching violent space weather tantrums. RELATED STORIES —A mysterious, 100-year solar cycle may have just restarted — and it could mean decades of dangerous space weather —NASA's Parker Solar Probe spots powerful magnetic explosion aimed at the sun's surface —Ancient superpowered solar storm that hit Earth 14,000 years ago is the 'biggest ever identified' Solar Orbiter will have several more chances to test these predictions over the coming years. With a little help from the gravitational pull of Venus, Solar Orbiter will continue tilting its orbit further from the solar equator, reaching a tilt of 24 degrees in December 2026 and a whopping 33 degrees in June 2029. These ever-more-angular vantage points will expose the solar poles in even greater detail, improving our knowledge of our home star with every flyby. "This is just the first step of Solar Orbiter's 'stairway to heaven'," Daniel Müller, ESA's Solar Orbiter project scientist, said in the statement. "These data will transform our understanding of the Sun's magnetic field, the solar wind, and solar activity."
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9 hours ago
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This is the largest map of the universe ever made, and anyone can explore it
If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, BGR may receive an affiliate commission. The universe is a big place, and while we're still unraveling the mysteries of the early universe, the James Webb Space Telescope has given us unprecedented looks at the cosmos around our little blue dot. Now, a massive trove of data from Webb has been released, including an interactive version of the largest map of the universe ever created. The map, which was shared as part of the Cosmic Evolution Survey out of Caltech, mapped out roughly 0.54 square degrees of the sky. The map, in all, weighs in at around 1.5 TB of data. It's massive, to say the least. Today's Top Deals Best deals: Tech, laptops, TVs, and more sales Best Ring Video Doorbell deals Memorial Day security camera deals: Reolink's unbeatable sale has prices from $29.98 Included among the shiny objects you can see in the largest map of the universe ever created are galaxies and stars that date back 13.5 billion years. These are some of the earliest looks at the cosmos that we have ever had as humans. This is one of those times where the internet really proves its worth to the world, giving everyone free access to this data. Researchers used James Webb's near infrared camera to map out the sky, capturing data across various stars and galaxies. And while the data is far too much for any one person to peer through alone, the interactive map means that you can easily take a look at everything Webb has collected, without having to dig into it deep enough to get lost. It also pairs really well with the most detailed map of the universe ever created. The map easily loads up in your browser, too, so you don't have to jump through hoops to take a look. You can even change the view up by interacting with the various icons on the top right, which will allow you to look at images in NIRCam, RGB, and more. This gives you the most comprehensive viewing experience for this large map of the universe. While you can't search for specific galaxies or stars based on name, you can easily sift through the map at your leisure, zooming in and out however you please. I highly recommend taking a look yourself, and enjoy the fruits of the labor that astronomers have been putting in over the past couple of years since Webb launched. More Top Deals Amazon gift card deals, offers & coupons 2025: Get $2,000+ free See the
Yahoo
13 hours ago
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Solar Orbiter Captures the First-Ever Images of the Sun's South Pole
We Earthlings see the sun every day of our lives—but gaining a truly new view of our star is a rare and precious thing. So count your lucky stars: for the first time in history, scientists have photographed one of the sun's elusive poles. The images come courtesy of a spacecraft called Solar Orbiter. Led by the European Space Agency (ESA) with contributions from NASA, Solar Orbiter launched in February 2020 and has been monitoring our home star since November 2021. But the mission is only now beginning its most intriguing work: studying the poles of the sun. From Earth and spacecraft alike, our view of the sun has been biased. 'We've had a good view of centermost part of the sun's disk,' says Daniel Müller, a heliophysicist and project scientist for the mission. 'But the poles are effectively not visible because we always see them almost exactly edge-on.' [Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter] We began getting a better perspective earlier this year, when Solar Orbiter zipped past Venus in a carefully choreographed move that pulled the probe out of the solar system's ecliptic, the plane that broadly passes through the planets' orbits and the sun's equator. (The new views show the sun's south pole and were captured in March. The spacecraft flew over the north pole in late April, Müller says, but Solar Orbiter is still in the process of beaming that data back to Earth.) Leaving the ecliptic is a costly, fuel-expensive maneuver for spacecraft, but it's where Solar Orbiter excels: By the end of the mission, the spacecraft's orbit will be tilted 33 degrees with respect to the ecliptic. That tilted orbit is what allows Solar Orbiter to garner unprecedented views of the sun's poles. For scientists, the new view is priceless because these poles aren't just geographic poles; they're also magnetic poles—of sorts. The sun is a massive swirl of plasma that produces then erases a magnetic field. This is what drives the 11-year solar activity cycle. At solar minimum, the lowest-activity part of the cycle, the sun's magnetic field is what scientists call a dipole: it looks like a giant bar magnet, with a strong pole at each end. But as the sun spins, the roiling plasma generates sunspots, dark, relatively cool patches on the sun's surface that are looping tangles of magnetic field lines. As sunspots arise and pass away, these tangles unfurl, and some of the leftover magnetic charge migrates to the nearest pole, where it offsets the polarity of the existing magnetic field. The result is a bizarre transitional state, with the sun's poles covered in a patchwork of localized 'north' and 'south' magnetic polarities. In the solar maximum phase (which the sun is presently in), the magnetic field at each pole effectively disappears. (It can be a bumpy process—sometimes one pole loses its charge before the other, for example.) Then, as years pass and solar activity gradually declines, the continuing process of sunspots developing and dissipating creates a new magnetic field of the opposite charge at each pole until, eventually, the sun reaches its calm dipole state again. These aren't matters of academic curiosity; the sun's activity affects our daily lives. Solar outbursts such as radiation flares and coronal mass ejections of charged plasma can travel across the inner solar system to reach our neighborhood, and they're channeled out of the sun by our star's ever changing magnetic fields. On Earth these outbursts can disrupt power grids and radio systems; in orbit they can interfere with communications and navigations satellites and potentially harm astronauts. So scientists want to be able to predict this so-called space weather, just as they do terrestrial weather. But to do that, they need to better understand how the sun works—which is difficult to do with hardly a glimpse of the magnetic activity at and around our star's poles. That's where Solar Orbiter comes in. Most of the spacecraft's observations won't reach Earth until this autumn. But ESA has released initial looks from three different instruments onboard Solar Orbiter, each of which lets scientists glimpse different phenomena. For example, the image above maps the magnetic field at the sun's surface. And from this view, Müller says, it's clear that the sun is at the maximum period of its activity cycle. Heliophysical models predict 'a tangled mess of all these different patches of north and south polarity all over the place,' he says. 'And that's exactly what we see.' As their accordance with theoretical models suggests, the solar poles aren't entirely mysterious realms. That's in part because while Solar Orbiter is the first to beam back polar images, it isn't the first spacecraft to fly over these regions. That title belongs to Ulysses, a joint NASA-ESA mission that launched in 1990 and operated until 2009. Ulysses carried a host of instruments designed to study radiation particles, magnetic fields, and more. And it used them to make many intriguing discoveries about our star and its curious poles. But it carried no cameras, so despite all its insights, Ulysses left those regions as sights unseen. Fortunately, heliophysics has grown a lot since those days—and space agencies have learned that, in the public eye, a picture can be worth much more than 1,000 words. The result: Solar Orbiter can finally put the spotlight on the sun's poles.
