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Mars Base

First Saturn-like rings circle alien world - 0 views

www.astronomynow.com/...11rings

scibyte29 exoplanet rings

shared by Mars Base on 13 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • 11 January 2012
  • Saturn-like ring system has been discovered 420 light years away
  • using the ground-based SuperWASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) and All Sky Automated Survey (ASAS),
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • do the rings encompass a planet or a companion star?
  • four defined rings stretch out tens of millions of kilometres from the central object
  • dubbed Rochester, Sutherland, Campanas and Tololo after the sites where the eclipsed star was first detected and analysed
  • similar in mass to our own Sun, but a fraction of its age at just 16 million years.
  • Usually a star’s light is temporarily and periodically dimmed as a planet passes in front of it
  • in this case the team observed an unusually long and deep eclipse with up to 95 percent of the star’s light being dimmed by what the team conclude is a dusty ring system.
  • the only plausible explanation was some sort of dust ring system orbiting a smaller companion
  • Saturn on steroids
  • the first time astronomers have detected an extrasolar ring system transiting a Sun-like star
  • astronomers are unable to conclude what the ring system is orbiting
  • could be a very low-mass star, a brown dwarf, or a gas planet
  • hope to find the answer
  • over the next two years
  • another mystery
  • two pronounced gaps located between rings
  • gaps are carved by moons that have enough mass to gravitationally clear a path along their orbits
  • Saturnian system
  • brown dwarf or star then we could be seeing the late stages of planet formation in action
  • a giant planet, then perhaps there is a moon in the making.
Mars Base

'Saturn on Steroids': 1st Ringed Planet Beyond Solar System Possibly Found | Alien Plan... - 0 views

www.space.com/teroids-deep-space-aas219.html

scibyte29 Kepler rings WASP ASAS

shared by Mars Base on 13 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • enigmatic object detected five years ago in space may be a ringed alien world comparable to Saturn
  • Mind the gaps
  • gaps usually are signs that massive bodies are sculpting the ring edges
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • a planet, moons could be carving these rings
  • it could be newborn planets that are responsible.
Mars Base

Rocket powered by nuclear fusion could send humans to Mars - 0 views

phys.org/...red-nuclear-fusion-humans.html

scibyte90 MarsMission

shared by Mars Base on 11 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • researchers and scientists
  • are building components of a fusion-powered rocket aimed to clear many of the hurdles that block deep space travel, including long times in transit, exorbitant costs and health risks
  • funded through NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Program
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • Last month
  • presented their mission analysis for a trip to Mars, along with detailed computer modeling and initial experimental results
  • one of a handful of projects awarded a second round of funding last fall after already receiving phase-one money in a field of 15 projects chosen from more than 700 proposals
  • NASA estimates a round-trip human expedition to Mars would take more than four years using current technology
  • team have published papers calculating the potential for 30- and 90-day expeditions to Mars using a rocket powered by fusion, which would make the trip more practical and less costly
  • They have demonstrated successful lab tests of all portions of the process
  • Now, the key will be combining each isolated test into a final experiment that produces fusion using this technology
  • The research team has developed a type of plasma that is encased in its own magnetic field
  • Nuclear fusion occurs when this plasma is compressed to high pressure with a magnetic field.
  • The team has successfully tested this technique in the lab.
  • a small grain of sand of this material has the same energy content as 1 gallon of rocket fuel.
  • power a rocket, the team has devised a system in which a powerful magnetic field causes large metal rings to implode around this plasma, compressing it to a fusion state
  • The converging rings merge to form a shell that ignites the fusion, but only for a few microseconds
  • enough energy is released from the fusion reactions to quickly heat and ionize the shell
  • This super-heated, ionized metal is ejected out of the rocket nozzle at a high velocity. This process is repeated every minute or so, propelling the spacecraft
  • successfully demonstrated the metal-crushing process
  • The team had a sample of the collapsed, fist-sized aluminum ring resulting from one of those tests on hand for people to see and touch at the recent NASA symposium
  • Now, the team is working to bring it all together by using the technology to compress the plasma and create nuclear fusion
  • With the flip of a switch, the capacitors are simultaneously triggered to deliver 1 million amps of electricity for a fraction of a second to the magnet, which quickly compresses the metal ring.
  • The mechanical process and equipment used are reasonably straightforward
  • In actual space travel, scientists would use lithium metal as the crushing rings to power the rocket. Lithium is very reactive, and for lab-testing purposes, aluminum works just as well
  • Nuclear fusion may draw concern because of its application in nuclear bombs, but its use in this scenario is very different
  • The fusion energy for powering a rocket would be reduced by a factor of 1 billion from a hydrogen bomb, too little to create a significant explosion
  • Also,
  • concept uses a strong magnetic field to contain the fusion fuel and guide it safely away from the spacecraft and any passengers within
Mars Base

The World's Oldest Animal Is Even Older Than We Thought | Popular Science - 0 views

www.popsci.com/...t-animal-even-older-we-thought

scibyte110

shared by Mars Base on 16 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Ming, a mollusk of the species Arctica islandica. In 2006, researchers
  • examined its interior growth rings--patterns on the inside of its shell--to determine its age
  • at an impressive 405 years old
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • now researchers are reporting it's more than an entire century older than that: a healthy 507 years
  • originally, researchers counted the rings on its shell, which usually provides an accurate count, since the clams produce another ring each summer
  • the rings were so compressed there was apparently a miscount
  • . A new count of rings on the exterior, confirmed by carbon dating, gave the new age
  • Ming's slow metabolism is what allows it to survive for so long
  • Ming died
  • back in 2006
  • it's not unlikely that an even older one has been found and not properly researched
Mars Base

Saturn's Icy Moon Dione Has Oxygen Atmosphere | Saturn Pictures | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/n-dione-oxygen-atmosphere.html

scibyte36 Saturn Dione

shared by Mars Base on 03 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • NASA spacecraft circling Saturn has discovered a wispy oxygen atmosphere on the ringed planet's icy moon Dione
  • is 5 trillion times less dense than the air at Earth's surface
  • detected by NASA's Cassini spacecraft
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • equivalent to conditions 300 miles (480 kilometers) above Earth
  • one oxygen ion for every 2,550 cubic feet (90,000 cubic meters
  • still enough to qualify as an atmosphere
  • announced Friday (March 2).
  • Dione, in addition to Saturn's rings and the moon Rhea, is a source of oxygen molecules
  • shows that molecular oxygen is actually common in the Saturn system and reinforces that it can come from a process that doesn't involve life
  • Dione is one of Saturn's smaller moons
  • 698 miles (1,123 km) wide
  • orbits Saturn once every 2.7 days
  • distance of about 234,000 miles (377,400 km)
  • roughly the same as that between Earth and its moon
  • The oxygen on Dione may potentially be created by solar photons or high-energy particles that bombard the Saturn moon's ice-covered surface, kicking up oxygen ions in the process, Tokar explained.  Another idea suggests that geologic processes on Dione could feed the moon's atmosphere, researchers added.
  • atmosphere on Saturn's moon Rhea — one similar to that of Dione — was also detected in 2010
  • Dione was discovered in 1684 by astronomer Giovanni Cassini
  • named after the Greek goddess Dione, who the ancient Greek poet Homer described as the mother of the goddess Aphrodite
  • launched the Cassini mission in 1997 and it has been orbiting Saturn since its arrival at the ringed planet in 2004
  • joint effort by NASA and the space agencies of Europe and Italy, has been extended several times, most recently until 2017
Mars Base

Daytime Lightning on Saturn Spotted by Cassini Spacecraft | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/lightning-cassini-picture.html

scibyte55 SaturnLightning cassini

shared by Mars Base on 18 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Cassini orbiter captured the daytime lightning on Saturn as bright blue spots inside a giant storm that raged on the planet last year
  • NASA unveiled the new Saturn lightning photos Wednesday (July 18), adding that the images came as a big surprise
  • The fact that Cassini was able to detect the lightning means that it was very intense."
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • blue filter on the spacecraft's main camera recorded the lightning flashes
  • scientists then exaggerated the blue tint in order to pin down the lightning's location and size
  • analysis of the new images revealed that the energy from the visible lightning flashes alone could have spiked up to 3 billion watts over one second
  • on par with some of the strongest lightning flashes on Earth.  
  • the lightning on Saturn was spotted across a region 100 miles (160 kilometers
  • Cassini spotted eight daytime lightning flashes on Saturn, five in one part of the storm and three in an another
  • storm wrapped completely around Saturn at its peak and is the longest-lived storm ever seen on the ringed planet. It began in December 2010 and lasted about 200 days, finally sputtering out in late June 2011
  • mystery that remains is why the daytime Saturn lightning only turned up in Cassini's blue imaging filter
  • Scientists aren't sure if that means the lightning is actually blue in color, or if it's due to a short exposure time of the camera that helps the camera filter detect the lightning
Mars Base

Is Saturn Making a New Moon? - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...is-saturn-making-a-new-moon

scibyte127 SaturnRings

shared by Mars Base on 15 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • A bright clump spotted orbiting Saturn at the outermost edge of its A ring may be a brand new moon in the process of being born
  • have not seen anything like this before
  • In images acquired with Cassini’s narrow-angle camera in 2013
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • a 1,200-kilometer-long, 10-kilometer-wide arc of icy material was observed traveling along the edge of the A ring
  • The arc is thought to be the result of gravitational perturbations caused by an as-yet unseen embedded object about a kilometer wide — possibly a miniature moon in the process of formation
  • The half-mile-wide object has been unofficially named “Peggy,”
  • According to the team’s paper, Peggy’s effects on the A ring has been visible to Cassini since May 2012
  • Eventually Peggy may coalesce into a slightly larger moon and move outward, establishing its own orbital path around Saturn
  • This is how many of Saturn’s other moons are thought to have formed much further back in the planet’s history
  • While it is possible that the bright perturbation is the result of an object’s breakup rather than formation, researchers are still looking forward to finding out more about its evolution.
Mars Base

Sun sends more 'tsunami waves' to Voyager 1 - 0 views

phys.org/...14-07-sun-tsunami-voyager.html

scibyte136 Voyager1

shared by Mars Base on 12 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has experienced a new "tsunami wave" from the sun as it sails through interstellar space
  • Such waves are what led scientists to the conclusion, in the fall of 2013, that Voyager had indeed left our sun's bubble, entering a new frontier
  • "Normally, interstellar space is like a quiet lake,
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Ed Stone of the California Institute of Technology
  • But when our sun has a burst, it sends a shock wave outward that reaches Voyager about a year later. The wave causes the plasma surrounding the spacecraft to sing."
  • Data from this newest tsunami wave generated by our sun confirm that Voyager is in interstellar space
  • The mission has not left the solar system—it has yet to reach a final halo of comets surrounding our sun—but it broke through the wind-blown bubble, or heliosphere, encasing our sun
  • ur sun goes through periods of increased activity, where it explosively ejects material from its surface, flinging it outward
  • These events, called coronal mass ejections, generate shock, or pressure, waves. Three such waves have reached Voyager 1 since it entered interstellar space in 2012
  • The first was too small to be noticed when it occurred and was only discovered later, but the second was clearly registered by the spacecraft's cosmic ray instrument in March of 2013
  • another instrument on Voyager
  • The plasma wave instrument can detect oscillations of the plasma electrons
  • This ringing of the plasma bell is what led to the key evidence showing Voyager had entered interstellar space
  • "The tsunami wave rings the plasma like a bell," said Stone. "While the plasma wave instrument lets us measure the frequency of this ringing, the cosmic ray instrument reveals what struck the bell—the shock wave from the sun."
  • denser plasma oscillates faster, the team was able to figure out the density of the plasma
  • In 2013, thanks to the second tsunami wave, the team acquired evidence that Voyager had been flying for more than a year through plasma that was 40 times denser than measured before—a telltale indicator of interstellar space
  • Now, the team has new readings from a third wave from the sun, first registered in March of this year
  • These data show that the density of the plasma is similar to what was measured previously, confirming the spacecraft is in interstellar space
Mars Base

SpaceX Grasshopper Takes a Leap Into a 'Ring of Fire' - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...kes-a-leap-into-a-ring-of-fire

scibyte86 SpaceX

shared by Mars Base on 12 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • On March 7, 2013, the vertical and takeoff and landing (VTVL) vehicle, rose 24 stories or 80.1 meters (262.8 feet), hovered for approximately 34 seconds and then landed safely – and more accurately than ever before
  • The goal of Grasshopper is to eventually create a reusable first stage for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, which would be able to land safely instead of falling back into the ocean and not being usable again
  • This is Grasshopper’s fourth in a series of test flights, with each test demonstrating exponential increases in altitude
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Last September, Grasshopper flew to 2.5 meters (8.2 feet),
  • in November, it flew to 5.4 meters (17.7 feet)
  • in December, it flew to 40 meters (131 feet).
  • Grasshopper stands 10 stories tall
  • consists of a Falcon 9 rocket first stage tank, Merlin 1D engine, four steel and aluminum landing legs with hydraulic dampers, and a steel support structure
Mars Base

Saturn-Like Alien Planet Found by Little Telescope | KELT-6b | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/-saturn-like-alien-planet.html

scibyte97 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 05 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Tiny telescopes in Arizona and South Africa have spotted a Saturn-like planet in orbit around a star about 700 light-years from Earth.
  • the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) and other ground-based tools spied the alien planet as it passed in front of its star
  • KELT-6b, can be seen from the surface of Earth for five hours as it transits
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • year lasts only about 7.8 days
  • KELT-6b has no rings, its mass and size resemble the planet Saturn
Mars Base

45 meter Asteroid to Skirt Very Near Earth on Feb 15 - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...kirt-very-near-earth-on-feb-15

scibyte82 NearEarthObject

shared by Mars Base on 13 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Friday (Feb. 15)
  • a space rock roughly half a football field wide skirts very close by Earth
  • well inside the
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • expensive communications and weather satellites that ring around us in geosynchronous orbit
  • no possibility of an Earth impact
  • altitude of 27,700 kilometers (17,200 miles). That is some 8000 km (5000 miles) inside the ring of geosynchronous satellites
  • if an asteroid the size of 2012 DA14 fell to Earth, the impact effect would be similar to the 1908 Tunguska event in Siberia
  • the K-T event that caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago was caused by an asteroid about 10 km (6 mi) in diameter
  • no danger to the ISS crew and apparently they won’t have any chance to observe it.
  • ISS is not positioned right for observations
  • “No NASA space-based assets will be making measurements
  • asteroid is moving to fast
  • radar astronomers do plan to take images around eight hours after the flyby using the Goldstone antenna in California’s Mojave Desert
  • 2012 DA 14
Mars Base

Astronomers Find Saturn's Possible Cosmic Doppelgänger - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...s-possible-cosmic-doppleganger

scibyte29 WASP ASAS rings multimedia

shared by Mars Base on 13 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • January 12, 2012
  • An artist's impression of a possible Saturn-like planet orbiting around a distant star. Image credit: Michael Osadciw/University of Rochester
  • An artist's impression of a brown dwarf surrounded by a cloud of proto-planet dust. Image credit: JPL
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • A size comparison between the Sun, a low mass star, a brown dwarf, Jupiter, and the Earth. Image credit: NASA
  • Two of Saturn's shepherd moons keep the planet's F ring in check. Image Credit: NASA/JPL
Mars Base

Super-sensitive Camera Captures a Direct Image of an Exoplanet - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...a-direct-image-of-an-exoplanet

scibyte115 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 08 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • The world’s newest and most powerful exoplanet imaging instrument
  • has captured its first-light infrared image of an exoplanet
  • which orbits
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • the second-brightest star in the southern constellation Pictor
  • a distant planet 63 light-years away and several times more massive — as well as 60% larger — than Jupiter
  • many exoplanets have been discovered and confirmed over the past couple of decades using various techniques, very few have actually been directly imaged
  • Most planets that we know about to date are only known because of indirect methods that tell us a planet is there
  • With GPI we directly image planets around stars
  • doesn’t just image distant Jupiter-sized exoplanets; it images them quickly
  • early first-light images are almost a factor of ten better than the previous generation of instruments
  • In one minute, we were seeing planets that used to take us an hour to detect
  • Beta Pictoris b is a very young planet — estimated to be less than 10 million years old (the star itself is only about 12 million
  • presence is a testament to the ability of large planets to form rapidly and soon around newly-formed stars
  • saw this on only the first week after the instrument was put on the telescope
  • what it will be able to do once we tweak and completely tune its performance
  • Another
  • images captured light scattered by a ring of dust that surrounds the young star HR4796A , about 237 light-years away
  • “Some day, there will be an instrument that will look a lot like GPI, on a telescope in space. And the images and spectra that will come out of that instrument will show a little blue dot that is another Earth.” – Bruce Macintosh, GPI team leader
Mars Base

Curiosity Rover Snaps Best Mars Solar Eclipse Photos Ever | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/se-curiosity-rover-photos.html

G+ Curiosity scibyte101

shared by Mars Base on 07 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Phobos does not completely cover the sun as seen from the Red Planet's surface, so the Aug. 17 event was an annular or "ring of fire" eclipse
  • Phobos is just 14 miles (22 kilometers) wide on average
  • Phobos appears
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • relatively big
  • because the moon orbits so close to Mars
  • just 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers
  • Phobos takes eight hours to complete one lap around Mars
  • Observations of Phobos and Deimos by Curiosity and
  • Opportunity should help researchers refine their knowledge of the two moons' orbits
Mars Base

High-School Student Finds Bumpy-Headed Baby Dino | LiveScience - 0 views

www.livescience.com/2-baby-dinosaur-discovery.html

scibyte107 dinosaur

shared by Mars Base on 27 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • A dinosaur skeleton discovered by
  • d high-school student turns out to be the smallest, youngest and most complete duck-billed dinosaur of its kind ever found.
  • This Cretaceous-era herbivore, Parasaurolophus, walked the Earth some 75 million years ago.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • dinosaurs in this genus are best known for their impressive tube-shaped head crests, which may have been used for display or perhaps to amplify the animals' calls
  • specimen
  • was so young that its crest was a mere bump on its head.
  • Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology in Claremont, Calif
  • is affiliated with The Webb Schools, a private high-school campus outside of Los Angeles
  • The students at the schools participate in paleontology fieldwork as part of their coursework
  • in 2009
  • a group of students were prospecting for fossils in Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, surveying ground
  • already covered
  • spotted a little sliver of bone sticking out from under a boulder and alerted
  • thought it looked like a piece of dinosaur rib — nice, but not really worth the trouble of excavating.
  • the other side of the boulder
  • what looked like a large cobblestone
  • . A dinosaur skull
  • The team had to line up permits to excavate on the public land
  • returned in 2010 to dig the bones from the ground
  • 800-pound (363 kilograms) armor of rock, the bones had to be airlifted out of the rugged backcountry by helicopter
  • After 1,300 painstaking hours of cleaning, chiseling and picking, technicians revealed the fossil buried in all that stone
  • paleontologists realized they had an amazing example of a baby Parasaurolophus
  • they were able to sample the baby's leg bone. As dinosaur bones grow, they develop ring patterns, much like trees
  • didn't have any rings at all
  • that this animal was under a year old when it died
  • The infant dinosaur was already 6 feet (1.8 meters) long
  • duck-billed dinos hatched at about the same size as a human infant
  • "Joe" was already sprouting a crest bump so young suggests that Parasaurolophus started growing its crest earlier than other duck-billed dinosaurs.
  • "Joe" will go on display at the Alf museum beginning
  • Oct. 22
  • A digital exploration of the skeleton will also be available at dinosaurjoe.com.
  • the student who found the little duck-bill,
  • now in college, studying geology
  • understand how Parasaurolophus evolved that big crest, just by shifting around events in its development
Mars Base

GRAIL First Results Provide Most Precise Lunar Gravity Map Yet - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...most-precise-lunar-gravity-map

scibyte74 Grail

shared by Mars Base on 06 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • first science results from NASA’s twin GRAIL lunar orbiters provide incredible detail of the Moon’s interior and the highest resolution gravity field map of any celestial body, including Earth
  • Ebb and Flow, send radio signals to each other and any changes in distance between the two as they circle the Moon are measured, down to changes as small as
  • 1/ 20,000th the velocity that a snail moves
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • new gravity maps reveals an abundance of features such as tectonic structures, volcanic landforms, basin rings, crater central peaks and numerous simple, bowl-shaped craters
  • the moon’s gravity field is unlike that of any terrestrial planet in our solar system.
  • Ninety-eight percent of local gravity is associated with topography, while 2 percent are other gravitational features
  • You can see bull’s-eyes of the lunar mascons, but otherwise we see a smooth inner surface
  • The only way this could happen is if impacts to the early Moon shattered the inner surface
  • also revealed evidence for ancient volcanic activity under the surface of the Moon and strange linear gravitational anomalies
  • identified a large population of linear gravitational anomalies. We don’t see any expression of them on topography maps, so we infer that these are an ancient internal structures
  • Basin, which forms one of the ‘man on moon’s’ eyes, the gravity maps shows a linear feature crossing the basin while topography maps show no such correlating feature
  • the gravity anomaly formed before the impacts
  • Additional data reveal that the Moon’s inner crust in almost completely pulverized
  • Using GRAIL gravity data, we found the average thickness of the crust is 32-34 kilometers which is about 10 km less than previous studies
  • We found the bulk abundance of aluminum on Moon is nearly the same as that of the Earth
  • consistent with a recent hypothesis that the Moon is derived of materials from the Earth when it was formed during a giant impact event
  • GRAIL finishes the primary science mission in May and are currently working in an extended mission where the spacrafts’ altitude was lowered to just 23 km above the surface
  • During its prime mission, the two GRAIL spacecraft orbited just 55 km above the Moon’s surface
  • hearing results from the new data sets soon
  • the team will lower the GRAIL spacecraft down to just 11 km above the lunar surface.
  • extended mission will end soon, in mid-December, and soon after that, the two spacecraft will be crashed intentionally onto the lunar surface
  • they are still formulating ideas for the impact scenario, and looking at the possibility of aiming the crashes so they are within the field-of-view of instruments on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
Mars Base

Tiny Sun Activity Changes Affect Earth's Climate | Solar Sunspot Cycle | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/ar-activity-earth-climate.html

scibyte78 sun

shared by Mars Base on 18 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Even small changes in solar activity can impact Earth's climate in significant and surprisingly complex ways, researchers say.
  • The sun is a constant star when compared with many others in the galaxy
  • ome stars pulsate dramatically, varying wildly in size and brightness and even exploding
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • In comparison, the sun varies in the amount of light it emits by only 0.1 percent over the course of a relatively stable 11-year-long pattern known as the solar cycle.
  • "the light reaching the top of the Earth's atmosphere provides about 2,500 times as much energy as the total of all other sources combined,"
  • even 0.1 percent of the amount of light the sun emits exceeds all other energy sources the Earth's atmosphere sees combined, such as the radioactivity naturally emitted from Earth's core,
  • Many of the ways the scientists proposed these fluctuations in solar activity could influence Earth were complicated in nature.
  • , solar energetic particles and cosmic rays could reduce ozone levels in the stratosphere
  • in turn alters the behavior of the atmosphere below it, perhaps even pushing storms on the surface off cours
  • "In the lower stratosphere, the presence of ozone causes a local warming because of the breakup of ozone molecules by ultraviolet light,
  • When the ozone is removed, "the stratosphere there becomes cooler, increasing the temperature contrast between the tropics and the polar region
  • contrast in temperatures in the stratosphere and the upper troposphere leads to instabilities in the atmospheric flow west to east.
  • feed the strength of jet streams, ultimately altering flows in the upper troposphere, the layer of atmosphere closest to Earth's surface.
  • alter the distribution of storms over the middle latitudes
  • the sun might have a role to play in this kind of process. I would have to say this would be a very difficult mechanism to prove in climate models
  • climate scientist Gerald Meehl at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and his colleagues suggest that solar variability is leaving a definite imprint on climate, especially in the Pacific Ocean.
  • When researchers look at sea surface temperature data during sunspot peak years, the tropical Pacific showed a pattern very much like that expected with La Niña,
  • cyclical cooling of the Pacific Ocean that regularly affects climate worldwide, with sunspot peak years leading to a cooling of almost 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) in the equatorial eastern Pacific
  • peaks in the sunspot cycle were linked with increased precipitation in a number of areas across the globe, as well as above-normal sea-level pressure in the mid-latitude North and South Pacific.
  • Scientists have also often speculated whether the Maunder Minimum, a 70-year dearth of sunspots in the late 17th to early 18th century, was linked with the coldest part of the Little Ice Age, during which Europe and North America experienced bitterly cold winter
  • This regional cooling might be linked with a drop in the sun's extreme ultraviolet radiation.
  • t, the sun could currently be on the cusp of a miniature version of the Maunder Minimum, since the current solar cycle is the weakest in more than 50 years.
  • Although the sun is the main source of heat for Earth, the researchers note that solar variability may have more of a regional effect than a global one
  • While the sun is by far the dominant energy source powering our climate system, do not assume that it is causing much of recent climate changes. It's pretty stabl
  • Ancient signals of climate such as tree rings and ice cores might also help shed light on the link between the sun and climate
  • Since variations in Earth's magnetic field and atmospheric circulation might disrupt this evidence on Earth,
  • a better long-term record of solar radiation might lie in the rocks and sediments of the moon or Mar
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