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Categories: Mathematics: Statistics, Space: The Solar System

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Venus Express has spied a surprisingly cold region high in the planet's atmosphere that may be frigid enough for carbon dioxide to freeze out as ice or snow.

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Stormy weather on the sun drives the glistening aurorae in our clear night skies.

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The sun erupted with a wide, Earth-directed coronal mass ejection on Sept. 27, 2012 at 10:25 p.m. EDT.

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New movies of the transit of Venus on June 6, 2012, viewed from two different locations on Earth, clearly show the parallax effects that have made Venus transits so important historically. The results were presented at the European Planetary Science Congress in Madrid, Spain.

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On August 31, 2012 a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun's atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space at 4:36 p.m. EDT. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled at over 900 miles per second. The CME did not travel directly toward Earth, but did connect with Earth's magnetic environment, or magnetosphere, with a glancing blow. causing aurora to appear on the night of Monday, September 3.

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Thirty-five years ago Aug. 20, NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft, the first Voyager spacecraft to launch, departed on a journey that would make it the only spacecraft to visit Uranus and Neptune and the longest-operating NASA spacecraft ever. Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, that launched 16 days later on Sept. 5, 1977, are still going strong, hurtling away from our sun. Mission managers are eagerly anticipating the day when they break on through to the other side -- the space between stars.

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In August of 2005, the Mars Express spacecraft was dutifully sending back data on the stratigraphy of the upper regions of the Martian crust when its signal kept getting interrupted. Scientists wanted to know why. Now, researchers have provided a clear answer.

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A new image was captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory on July 19, 2012 of an M7.7 class solar flare. The image represents light in the 131 Angstrom wavelength, which is particularly good for seeing flares, and which is typically colorized in teal.

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Over the July 14-15, 2012 weekend and through the early morning of July 16, Earth experienced what's called a geomagnetic storm, which happens when the magnetic bubble around Earth, the magnetosphere, quickly changes shape and size in response to incoming energy from the sun. In this case that energy came from a coronal mass ejection (CME) associated with a July 12 X-class flare.

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A team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is reporting the discovery of another moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto. The moon is estimated to be irregular in shape and 6 to 15 miles across. It is in a 58,000-mile-diameter circular orbit around Pluto that is assumed to be co-planar with the other satellites in the system.

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Active Region 1515 has now spit out 12 M-class flares since July 3. Early in the morning of July 5, 2012, there was an M6.1 flare. It peaked at 7:44 AM EDT. This caused a moderate -- classified as R2 on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's space weather scale -- radio blackout that has since subsided.

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An active region on the sun, numbered AR 1504, rotated into view over the left side of the sun on June 10, 2012. The region fired off two M-class flares and two coronal mass ejections (CMEs) on June 13 and June 14, 2012.

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It's the final opportunity of the century to witness the rare astronomical reunion of the sun, Venus and Earth. On Tuesday, June 5 or 6, 2012, depending on your location, Venus will make its presence in the solar system visible from Earth's day side. Using special eye safety precautions, viewers may see Venus as a small dot slowly drifting across the golden disk of the sun.

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When Venus transits the sun on June 5-6, an armada of spacecraft and ground-based telescopes will be on the lookout for something elusive and, until recently, unexpected: the arc of Venus.

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With the new data obtained during the Venus transit on June 5-6, 2012, the RHESSI team hopes to improve the knowledge of the exact shape of the sun and provide a more accurate measure of the diameter than has previously been obtained.

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On June 5, 2012, at 6:03 PM EDT, the planet Venus will do something it has done only seven times since the invention of the telescope: cross in front of the sun. This transit is among the rarest of planetary alignments and it has an odd cycle. Two such Venus transits always occur within eight years of each other and then there is a break of either 105 or 121 years before it happens again.

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A Venus transit across the face of the sun is a relatively rare event -- occurring in pairs with more than a century separating each pair. There have been all of 53 transits of Venus across the sun between 2000 B.C. and the last one in 2004. On Wednesday, June 6 (Tuesday, June 5 from the Western Hemisphere), Earth gets another shot at it -- and the last for a good long while. But beyond this uniquely celestial oddity, why has Venus been an object worthy of ogling for hundreds of centuries?

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More than 2 billion years ago, a much fainter sun should have left the Earth as an orbiting ice ball. Why we avoided the deep freeze is a question that has puzzled scientists, but one astronomer might have an answer.

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For the first time, scientists have captured images of auroras above the giant ice planet Uranus, finding further evidence of just how peculiar a world that distant planet is. Detected by means of carefully scheduled observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, the newly witnessed Uranian light show consisted of short-lived, faint, glowing dots - a world of difference from the colorful curtains of light that often ring Earth's poles.

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In 1977, Jimmy Carter was sworn in as president, Elvis died, Virginia park ranger Roy Sullivan was hit by lightning a record seventh time and two NASA space probes destined to turn planetary science on its head launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla. The identical spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, were launched in the summer and programmed to pass by Jupiter and Saturn on different paths. Voyager 2 went on to visit Uranus and Neptune, completing the "Grand Tour of the Solar System," perhaps the most exciting interplanetary mission ever flown. Scientists who designed and built identical instruments for Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were as stunned as anyone when the spacecraft began sending back data to Earth.