Sun

NASA and NOAA have confirmed that the Sun has entered a new solar cycle, with activity beginning to ramp back up from its minimum in December 2019. This next cycle is forecast to be rather quiet, continuing a long-term trend of reduced activity.

NASA has announced the selection of five Medium Class Explorer concept mission proposals that could one day revolutionize our understanding of the space environment, and see pictures taken of the Sun's polar regions.

Harvard scientists have suggested that the Sun had a long-lost twin. An ancient binary solar system helps explain the strange structure of the Oort cloud, and possibly the hypothetical Planet Nine. Best of all, the team outlines how we could check.

An ESA/NASA spacecraft has captured the closest pictures of the Sun ever taken. The images reveal that our star is covered in relatively tiny flare-like explosions that scientists have dubbed "campfires."

A team of material scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles is reporting a major advance in the area of reflective coatings for buildings, producing a new kind of super white paint that reflects almost all incoming radiation from Sun.

NASA has released a time-lapse video of our Sun that condenses 10 full years of solar observations into a 61 minute movie. The shots were taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, which has been keeping vigil over our parent star for a decade.

NASA has released video showing what sunsets might look like on a number of different planets. The simulations were created by a NASA planetary scientist using a computer modeling tool being developed for a possible future mission to Uranus.

Back in February, the European Space Agency and NASA launched the Solar Orbiter, a spacecraft developed in collaboration to study the Sun in entirely new ways, and the probe has now made its first close approach to our star.

ESA’s Solar Orbiter is set to have a chance encounter with the tails of a disintegrating comet. The probe is currently en route to the inner solar system and has had instruments rushed through commissioning to be ready for the unexpected rendezvous.

To get a sense of how “normal” the Sun may be, astronomers have compared the Sun to hundreds of similar stars. It turns out that it’s actually far less active than its peers – but is this a permanent personality, or is it just going through a phase?

Researchers at CNRS in France and UNESP in Brazil have traced back the odd orbits of objects called Centaurs and found that 19 of them must have originated around another star, before being captured by the Sun’s gravity.

In what are described as the highest-resolution images ever taken of the Sun’s atmosphere, scientists have detected previously unsighted threads of magnetic plasma woven throughout, offering new clues as to the makeup of its active outer layers.