In a major scientific breakthrough, a ‘super-Earth’ has been discoered orbiting the closest single star to the Sun. Astronomers studied Barnard’s Star, a red dwarf just six light years away — practically in our back garden, galactically speaking — and noticed the presence of a “frozen, dimly lit world” at least 3.2 times heavier than Earth. The planet, known as Barnard’s Star b, is the second nearest to Earth outside […]

Washington: A sounding rocket fitted with technology to gather 1,500 images of the Sun in flat five minutes is set for launch on Monday.Capturing five images per second, the Rapid Acquisition Imaging Spectrograph Experiment (RAISE) mission will focus in on the split-second changes that occur near active regions on the Sun. These are areas of intense and complex magnetic fields that can give birth to giant eruptions on the Sun […]

Initial blast from record-setting series of explosions was as much as 10,000 times more powerful than the largest solar flare ever recorded At its peak, the flare reached temperatures of 360 million degrees Fahrenheit (200 million Celsius), more than 12 times hotter than the center of the sun ‘Superflare’ came from one of the stars in a close binary system known as DG Canum Venaticorum located about 60 light-years away. […]