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Thanks to the new models, the team was able to show that both sizes of jet are triggered to erupt when the magnetic field lines in the surface of the Sun above them break and rejoin - a process known as magnetic reconnection.

The model showed differential rotation causes the sun’s magnetic fields to stretch and spread at different rates. The scientists demonstrated this constant process generates enough energy to form stealth CMEs over the course of roughly two weeks. The sun’s rotation increasingly stresses magnetic field lines over time, eventually warping them into a strained coil of energy. When enough tension builds, the coil expands and pinches off into a massive bubble of twisted magnetic fields — and without warning — the stealth CME quietly leaves the sun.

"Solar Probe Plus will swoop to within 4 million miles of the sun's surface, facing heat and radiation like no spacecraft before it," the space agency noted.

Created using footage captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft between 2011 and 2015, Sun is a mesmerising, perspective-shaking glimpse at Earth’s life-giving star. While seemingly immutable in the daytime sky, a closer look at the Sun reveals a dynamic and unpredictable body, blotted with sunspots and regularly spewing violent plasma eruptions far into interplanetary space.

The density in the chromosphere is significantly lower than in the sun’s interior, so the magnetic fields are no longer suppressed and are able to straighten out. As they unwind and release their tension, they fling hot plasma at incredible speeds, creating the spicules. The spicules surge thousands of miles high, passing through the chromosphere and into the sun’s corona before collapsing.

We examine the frequency shifts in low-degree helioseismic modes from the Birmingham Solar-Oscillations Network covering the period from 1985 to 2016, and compare them with a number of global activity proxies well as a latitudinally resolved magnetic index. As well as looking at frequency shifts in different frequency bands, we look at a parametrization of the shift as a cubic function of frequency. While the shifts in the medium- and high-frequency bands are very well correlated with all of the activity indices (with the best correlation being with the 10.7-cm radio flux), we confirm earlier findings that there appears to have been a change in the frequency response to activity during solar Cycle 23, and the low-frequency shifts are less correlated with activity in the last two cycles than they were in Cycle 22. At the same time, the more recent cycles show a slight increase in their sensitivity to activity levels at medium and higher frequencies, perhaps because a greater proportion of activity is composed of weaker or more ephemeral regions. This lends weight to the speculation that a fundamental change in the nature of the solar dynamo may be in progress.

Researchers have pinpointed a "smoking gun" behind the phenomenon of the sun's atmosphere being thousands of degrees hotter than the solar surface.

The path to science for a girl of any nationality born in the early twentieth century was formidable-to-nonexistent. Yet paths were forged by a few. We present the little-known story of one of Japan's premier solar observers and her contribution to the world's understanding of sunspots and space weather cycles. Ms. Hisako Koyama, born in Tokyo in 1916, became a passionate amateur astronomer, a dedicated solar observer, and a long-serving staff member of the National Museum of Nature and Science, Tokyo. As a writer for amateur astronomy journals she advised many on the details and joys of sky viewing. She created a consistent, extended record of sunspots. Her multidecade archive of sunspot drawings is one of the “backbones” for the recent international recalibration of the sunspot record that provides insight into space weather reaching back to the early 1600s. We detail her contributions to the citizens of Japan as an ambassador of astronomy and her international contribution to understanding the symmetries and asymmetries of the solar cycle. We comment on the value of her continuous record of sunspots and on her tenacity in promoting a science that links to space weather.

A research group led by Masumi Shimojo (Assistant Professor at NAOJ Chile Observatory), including members from Nagoya University, Kyoto University, and Ibaraki University, analyzed the more than 60 years of solar microwave data from these telescopes. They found that microwave intensities and spectra at the minimums of the latest five cycles were the same every time. In contrast, during the periods of maximum solar activity, both the intensity and spectrum varied from cycle to cycle.

Spoiler warning: (Neuroskeptic) doesn’t think this is true. In fact, (He) thinks the whole paper is based on a simple statistical error.

(JF Ptak) found--or bumped into--the following short note in Nature (September 5, 1878) . At first glance it has a flat-earthy/Nazis-on-the-dark-side-of-the-Moon quality to it, or at least to me it did. It is a very unexpected question, though it isn't quite what it seems at the outset before you try to think about what part of one-sidedness the author, Balfour Stewart, is addressing. Read the note, and then the title will make sense.