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| Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle (SSC) |
What if this ...
was the view out your window?
Showing posts with label suns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label suns. Show all posts
Saturday, August 11, 2012
The quest for a quaternary
HD 98800, a system about 150 light years from Earth:
What if this ...
What if this ...
Friday, December 23, 2011
but let's not shun the sun
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| Image credit: NASA |
The sun arrives each morning as predictably as it left the previous night ... and then there are coronal mass ejections.
Found in science fiction works, words having to do with one star or another:
"Things were difficult for him in a world with two suns. The new sun was tiny and white, while the old one was big and yellow. The new sun circled constantly overhead. It never set, and he could no longer catch things at night."
"The surface of the Sun, barely ten thousand miles below the clear-walled cabin of the Lightrider, was a floor across the Universe. The photosphere was a landscape, encrusted by granules each large enough to swallow the Earth, and with the chromosphere—the thousand-mile-thick outer atmosphere—a thin haze above it all."
"But the sun doesn't stop at the photosphere; the density of matter falls off slowly with height. If one included the ions and electrons that forever stream out into space in the solar wind—to cause auroras on Earth and to shape the plasma tails of comets—one might say that there was no real boundary to the Sun. It truly reaches out to touch the other stars."
"And the solar storm was blowing gouts of plasma, flooding some of their links with static. The sun was going through rough weather, spewing out big, noisy torrents."
But is the sun always bright and cheerful? Or it sometimes blue?
"Things were difficult for him in a world with two suns. The new sun was tiny and white, while the old one was big and yellow. The new sun circled constantly overhead. It never set, and he could no longer catch things at night."
"The surface of the Sun, barely ten thousand miles below the clear-walled cabin of the Lightrider, was a floor across the Universe. The photosphere was a landscape, encrusted by granules each large enough to swallow the Earth, and with the chromosphere—the thousand-mile-thick outer atmosphere—a thin haze above it all."
"But the sun doesn't stop at the photosphere; the density of matter falls off slowly with height. If one included the ions and electrons that forever stream out into space in the solar wind—to cause auroras on Earth and to shape the plasma tails of comets—one might say that there was no real boundary to the Sun. It truly reaches out to touch the other stars."
"And the solar storm was blowing gouts of plasma, flooding some of their links with static. The sun was going through rough weather, spewing out big, noisy torrents."
But is the sun always bright and cheerful? Or it sometimes blue?
