There may be nothing new under the sun, but there’s something new on the sun: sunspots. Last fall, astronomers who ignored their mothers’ advice not to look at the blazing orb observed the spots—which are actually powerful magnetically induced storms—on its surface after a nine-month absence, Canadian Geographic reports (article not available online). The sun hadn’t been spotless that long for 50 years.

The newly increased activity means we’re entering a new 11-year solar cycle in which sunspots will become more and more common. What’s it mean? Maybe warmer weather.

“A spotless sun is slightly cooler than a spotty sun, because the roiling solar plasma around the sunspots generates more energy,” the magazine writes. “Researchers are attempting to establish a correlation between solar activity and the earth’s weather. From 1645 to 1715, the solar cycle stopped, and sunspots virtually disappeared. This interval coincided with the Little Ice Age, a period of severe winters in the Northern Hemisphere that hasn’t been experienced since.”

The spotty sun will almost certainly mean more spectacular northern lights, or aurora borealis, which increase along with solar activity. A light-chasing Alaska photographer who calls himself the Aurora Hunter writes, “We are in the trough, ‘Deep Solar Minimum,’ and will soon be heading upward into what is referred to as Solar Cycle 24.” In layman’s terms, he compares sunspots to “a giant revolving firehose emitting energy into space.”

But don’t rush outdoors at night just yet: The cycle isn’t expected to peak until 2011-2013.

To stay up to date on solar activity and aurora forecasts, visit the website of the Geophysical Institute in Fairbanks, Alaska, or Calspace’s Space Weather page.

Sources: Canadian Geographic, Aurora Hunter, Geophysical Institute, Space Weather

Image by Don J. McCrady at StarryVistas.net, courtesy of the photographer . 

Mapping the universe is a vast and overwhelming job that scientists can’t do on their own. The website Galaxy Zoo has asked everyone on the internet for help identifying galaxies across the universe.

Visitors to the site are asked a series of simple questions about images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, mostly having to do with shapes. “This is a job that humans are much better at than computers,” according to the Galaxy Zoo website, “so most of the questions should be fairly easy.

The task seems like a simple game, but the effort has resulted in serious science. Four papers have already been published based on the project’s findings and at least four more are on the way.

Source: Galaxy Zoo 

The majesty of the cosmos seems somewhat diminished when scientists refer to planets by alphanumeric designations. David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” would be less impressive were it named “Life on HD 11964 d.” And I doubt that a book called, “Men Are From Kappa CrB b, Women Are From TrES-1 b” would sell very well. We give proper, sometimes impressive names to planets in our solar system, and Christopher Cokinos asks in the American Scholar (article not available online), “Shouldn’t we extend the courtesy to planets that orbit other stars?”

Giving creative names to distant planets could restore a sense of wonder and a greater attachment to the celestial bodies, Cokinos writes. When planets are named after mythological characters, it gives them a back story that amateurs and laypeople can understand better. It also places our planet as “part of a cosmic family and place worth protecting.”

To emphasize the point, here’s David Bowie’s “Life On Mars?”:

High-powered telescopes can now peek at the origins of distant stars, but there’s still little we know about our own cosmic backyard. Take, for example, the outer solar system: the dark, comet-infested void beyond the planets. Writing for Space.com, Charles Q. Choi runs through some of the open questions surrounding the outer solar system.

One of Choi’s most intriguing unknowns is an area known as the Oort Cloud, a scattering of trillions of comets spinning in the far reaches of the solar system. It’s so far away from the sun that no human has ever actually see it, scientists have only inferred its existence. Some have hypothesized that the Oort Cloud was part of a “protoplanetary disk” that surrounded the sun some 4.6 billion years ago. Understanding the mysteries the cloud contains could give insight into the formation of our humble earth.

—Brendan Mackie