New Japanese Supertelescope Reveals Runaway Industrial Pollution, Cow Farting On Surface of Sun

Ah, the Sun. On one hand, the source of light and warmth that makes life possible.

On the other hand, a bad "environmental citizen" responsible for catastrophic planetary heating and cooling not only on our world but on Mars as well as Pluto.

This aggression will not stand.

Anyway, some cool stuff about our hot neighbor.

The restless bubbling and frothing of the Sun's chaotic surface is astonishing astronomers who have been treated to detailed new images from a Japanese space telescope called Hinode. ...

"Everything we thought we knew about X-ray images of the Sun is now out of date," says Leon Golub from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US. "We've seen many new and unexpected things. For that reason alone, the mission is already a success."

Hinode (Japanese for "sunrise") was launched in September 2006 to study the solar magnetic field and how magnetic energy is released as the field rises into the Sun's outer atmosphere....

Hinode has sent back startling images of the Sun's outer limb. Where astronomers expected to see a calm region called the chromosphere, they saw a seething mass of swaying spikes[.]
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"These structures are 8000 kilometres long and some extend twice that high," says SOT science team member Alan Title from Lockheed Martin Advance Technology Center in Palo Alto, California, US. "Their speed is such that if you sat on the end of one, which I don't recommend, you could travel from Washington, DC, to San Francisco in about four minutes. These things are really moving."

Another surprise sighting is that of giant magnetic field loops crashing down onto the Sun's surface as if they were collapsing from exhaustion, a finding that Golub describes as "impossible". Previously, scientists thought they should emerge from the Sun and continue blowing out into space.

"Almost every day, we look at the data and we say – what the heck was that?" says Golub, a member of the XRT science team.

By all means, let's cripple the world economy before we have a chance to actually do more meaningful study of the body that is, by universal scientific opinion, not only responsible for "global warming" but also simple "global warmth."

Must-watch video here. Seriously, it's better than porn. Well, most porn.

Thanks to Blacksheep, who says "Blame Bush."

posted by Ace at 02:51 PM

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