Astronomy and Space

[Heracleum Persicum]

gwinFP8_qIM

[Heracleum Persicum]

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Man on Mars within 30 years

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Speaking on his return from last week’s UK trade trip to China, Mr Willetts predicted that Britain would be able to broker an international effort to get humans to another planet for the first time.

The minister told reporters: “If you wanted to bring the great powers together, probably looking a decade or two ahead, trying to get a man on Mars as a shared project between the Chinese, the Europeans and the Americans – it would be very exciting.

“Our hunger for discovery isn’t over. And one of the big advantages of the challenge of getting a manned mission to Mars is that it is such a big project that it probably requires global co-operation.”

He added: “I think it is possible within 30 years.”

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Beijing last week launched its first mission to put a Chinese rover on the moon as it looks to catch up with the US space programme and could become the first country to put a woman on the moon, according to Mr Willetts.

He said: “They will then put a man – or, I suspect, a woman – on the moon . . . and then go on to Mars. It’s a long-term plan and we are up for co-operation with them.”

Ministers are in talks with Beijing over using British robotics on future Chinese missions as part of a broader push to develop the UK space industry.

..

The science minister told reporters: “We are in a very good position . . . We are trusted partners of America. We are active players in the European Space Agency. And we are now opening up a new relationship with China, because we signed this week a memorandum of understanding for co-operation in space.”

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[Doc]

It may be later than we think !!

http://www.dvice.com/2013-12-13/great-u ... er-thought

Great: Universe might implode sooner than thought
Robin Burks
Friday, December 13, 2013 - 4:16pm
Credit: Wiki Commons

The Universe is not immortal. Eventually, it will either expand to the point of heat death, or it'll collapse. Either of these will likely take a very, very, very long time to happen, but a group of scientists from the University of Southern Denmark now believe that a collapse is more likely, and that we might have to knock off one of those "very"s from how long we've got. Yes, we’re all doomed.

"Phase transition" is what scientists call the process of the Universe imploding. It could happen when the field that the Higgs particle is a manifestation of changes value, making every particle in the Universe increase in mass millions of billions of times. The weight from those particles will shove everything everywhere into a single point called a singularity, and everything we know will disappear. In other words, phase transition is the opposite of the Big Bang that created our Universe, and is, in fact, based on what we know about the Big Bang.

Many physicists have calculated and theorized how this phase transition will happen, along with when. The Denmark team, however, believe their calculations and theory are the most precise to date. And their theory is frightening: they state that not only will the Universe collapse, but it’s now more likely to happen sooner. In fact, it could already be happening, starting on the outer fringes of the Universe, from where it will spread. Or it could start right here, in the next five minutes.

Before you grab your towel and stick your thumb up to the sky hoping to hitch a ride with friendly aliens, not all hope is lost. These scientists also stated that their new findings could mean that phase transition might not happen at all. The concept depends on what we know about the Higgs particle and if there are any other particles out there that we haven’t discovered yet. It’s a case of considering the factors of what we don’t know, more than what we currently know. In other words, don’t panic. But it certainly couldn’t hurt to keep that towel handy.

[Torchwood]

So China lands a moonrover. Well done.

But it's called Jade Rabbit

Wasn't she a porn star?

[Heracleum Persicum]

6YCUY2AF2rU

[Heracleum Persicum]

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Jade-Rabbit_2766187b.jpg (53.15 KiB) Viewed 2090 times

China's first moon rover, Jade Rabbit, touches the lunar surface

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"They are taking their time with getting to know about how to fly humans into space, how to build space stations ... how to explore the solar system, especially the moon and Mars," Peter Bond, consultant editor for Jane's Space Systems and Industry, told the Associated Press. "They are making good strides, and I think over the next 10, 20 years they'll certainly be rivaling Russia and America in this area and maybe overtaking them in some areas."

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[Typhoon]

So China lands a moonrover. Well done.

But it's called Jade Rabbit

Wasn't she a porn star?

Perhaps, however,

The spacecraft was named after Chang'e (Chinese: 嫦娥; pinyin: Cháng'é), the goddess of the Moon in Chinese mythology, and is a follow-up to the Chang'e 1 and Chang'e 2 lunar orbiters. The rover was named Yutu (Chinese: 玉兔; literally "Jade Rabbit") following an online poll, after the mythological rabbit that lives on the Moon as a pet of the Moon goddess.

cFb1E63AxNI

A Chinese friend told me that when she was young, people prayed to Chang'e, but after the Apollo 11 moon landing and no Chang'e to be seen anywhere, people stopped.

[monster_gardener]

Thank You VERY Much for maintaining the Forum, Admins Typhoon & YMix.

The asteroid is (well, was) named 2014 AA, the very first asteroid discovered this year. It was detected by the Mount Lemmon Survey using a 150 centimeter (60 inch) telescope located on a mountaintop in Arizona. The first image showing the asteroid was taken on Jan. 1, 2014, at about 06:20 UTC (01:20 EST)—telescopes work whenever the sky is clear, holidays or no. The rock was faint, at about magnitude 19; the faintest star you can see with your naked eye is 150,000 times brighter! But an orbital calculation showed it was very close to Earth, and getting closer.

In fact, as the Minor Planet Electronic Circular discovery announcement said, “It is virtually certain that 2014 AA hit the Earth's atmosphere on 2014 Jan. 2.2 +/- 0.4”—meaning around 05:00 UTC Jan. 2, midnight EST, just a few hours ago. It most likely burned up over the Atlantic, somewhere between South America and Africa.

From its brightness, it was probably about two to four meters across, about the size of a car. Objects that small generally disintegrate as they ram through the Earth’s atmosphere at high speed, so there was never any big danger from this object. It orbited the Sun on a path that took it just outside the orbit of Mars to just inside our own.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronom ... night.html

[Nonc Hilaire]

[Torchwood]

NASA is working on a warp drive

No, honestly, although to say that it is a long shot is unduly flattering. We probably need to understand dark energy first, if the latter really exists. At the moment it is simply a fudge in equations because the universe is expanding faster than it's supposed to in cosmological models.

[Endovelico]

Wow! I hope there is a consciousness I can call "I" around the time that becomes reality...

[Heracleum Persicum]

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very nice :


A man on the moon


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[Heracleum Persicum]

kJoMDq4AyLc

[monster_gardener]

Thank You VERY Much for Maintaining the Forum Typhoon & YMix,

NASA’s Asteroid Data Hunter contest series will offer $35,000, about 25,000 euro, in awards over the next six months to citizen scientists who develop improved algorithms that can be used to identify asteroids.
This contest series is being conducted in partnership with Planetary Resources Inc. of Bellevue, Wash. The first contest in the series will kick off on March 17. Prior to the kick off, competitors can create an account on the contest series website and learn more about the rules and different phases of the contest series by going to:

http://bit.ly/AsteroidHunters

Managed by the NASA Tournament Lab, the entire contest series runs through August and is the first contest series contributing to the agency’s Asteroid Grand Challenge.
“For the past three years, NASA has been learning and advancing the ability to leverage distributed algorithm and coding skills through the NASA Tournament Lab to solve tough problems,” said Jason Crusan, NASA Tournament Lab director. “We are now applying our experience with algorithm contests to helping protect the planet from asteroid threats through image analysis.”

The Asteroid Data Hunter contest series challenges participants to develop significantly improved algorithms to identify asteroids in images captured by ground-based telescopes. The winning solution must increase the detection sensitivity, minimize the number of false positives, ignore imperfections in the data, and run effectively on all computer systems.

“Protecting the planet from the threat of asteroid impact means first knowing where they are,” said Jenn Gustetic, Prizes and Challenges Program executive. “By opening up the search for asteroids, we are harnessing the potential of innovators and makers and citizen scientists everywhere to help solve this global challenge.”

Gustetic and Jason Kessler, Grand Challenges Program executive, will host a panel March 10 at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas titled “Are We Smarter than the Dinosaurs?” to talk about how open innovation can meaningfully engage people in discussions on and research into space exploration and help us solve problems of global importance. They will provide an outline of the Asteroid Data Hunter contest series and other efforts to detect asteroid threats, as well as ideas for mitigating these threats.

“Current asteroid detection initiatives are only tracking one percent of the estimated objects that orbit the Sun. We are excited to partner with NASA in this contest to help increase the quantity and knowledge about asteroids that are potential threats, human destinations, or resource rich.” said Chris Lewicki, President and Chief Engineer of the asteroid mining company Planetary Resources, Inc. “Applying distributed algorithm and coding skills to the extensive NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey data set will yield important insights into the state of the art in detecting asteroids.”

Through NASA’s asteroid initiative, the agency seeks to enhance its ongoing work in the identification and characterization of near-Earth objects for further scientific investigation. This work includes locating potentially hazardous asteroids and identifying those viable for redirection to a stable lunar orbit for future exploration by astronauts. The Asteroid Grand Challenge, one part of the asteroid initiative, expands the agency’s efforts beyond traditional boundaries and encourages partnerships and collaboration with a variety of organizations.

The algorithm contests are managed and executed by NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI). CoECI was established at the request of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to advance NASA open innovation efforts and extend that expertise to other federal agencies. CoECI uses the NASA Tournament Lab (NTL) for its advanced algorithmic and software development contests. Through its contract with Harvard Business School in association with Harvard’s Institute of Quantitative Social Science, NTL uses the topcoder platform to enable a community of more than 600,000 designers, developers and data scientists to create the most innovative, efficient and optimized solutions for specific, real-world challenges faced by NASA.

Source: NASA

http://www.euronews.com/2014/03/10/nasa ... d-hunters/

[monster_gardener]

Thank You VERY Much for Maintaining the Forum Typhoon & YMix,

An asteroid at least the size of a 60-story building will make a distant flyby of Earth this week, and you can watch astronomers track the space rock in a live webcast, weather-permitting. The asteroid poses no threat to Earth.

The online Slooh community observatory will host the free webcast at 10 p.m. EDT (0200 GMT) to track asteroid 2014 CU13, a space rock about 623 feet (190 meters) wide discovered on Feb. 11 that will pass Earth at a range of about eight times the distance between Earth and the moon on Tuesday (March 11). The average Earth-moon distance is about 239,000 miles (385,000 kilometers), so eight lunar distances is about 1.9 million miles (3 million km).

(MORE: Asteroid Breaks Up)

You can watch the asteroid webcast live above, with streaming views from Slooh's remotely operated telescope in the Canary Islands, off the west coast of Africa.

http://www.weather.com/news/science/spa ... h-20140309

[Endovelico]

Cosmic inflation: 'Spectacular' discovery hailed
By Jonathan Amos

Scientists say they have extraordinary new evidence to support a Big Bang Theory for the origin of the Universe.

Researchers believe they have found the signal left in the sky by the super-rapid expansion of space that must have occurred just fractions of a second after everything came into being.

It takes the form of a distinctive twist in the oldest light detectable with telescopes.

The work will be scrutinised carefully, but already there is talk of a Nobel.

"This is spectacular," commented Prof Marc Kamionkowski, from Johns Hopkins University.

"I've seen the research; the arguments are persuasive, and the scientists involved are among the most careful and conservative people I know," he told BBC News.

The breakthrough was announced by an American team working on a project known as BICEP2.

This has been using a telescope at the South Pole to make detailed observations of a small patch of sky.

The aim has been to try to find a residual marker for "inflation" - the idea that the cosmos experienced an exponential growth spurt in its first trillionth, of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.


Gravitational waves from inflation put a distinctive twist pattern in the polarisation of the CMB

Theory holds that this would have taken the infant Universe from something unimaginably small to something about the size of a marble. Space has continued to expand for the nearly 14 billion years since.

Inflation was first proposed in the early 1980s to explain some aspects of Big Bang Theory that appeared to not quite add up, such as why deep space looks broadly the same on all sides of the sky. The contention was that a very rapid expansion early on could have smoothed out any unevenness.

But inflation came with a very specific prediction - that it would be associated with waves of gravitational energy, and that these ripples in the fabric of space would leave an indelible mark on the oldest light in the sky - the famous Cosmic Microwave Background.

The BICEP2 team says it has now identified that signal. Scientists call it B-mode polarisation. It is a characteristic twist in the directional properties of the CMB. Only the gravitational waves moving through the Universe in its inflationary phase could have produced such a marker. It is a true "smoking gun".

"Detecting this signal is one of the most important goals in cosmology today. A lot of work by a lot of people has led up to this point," said Prof John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a leader of the BICEP2 collaboration.

The signal is reported to be quite a bit stronger than many scientists had dared hope. This simplifies matters, say experts. It means the more exotic models for how inflation worked are no longer tenable.

The results also constrain the energies involved - at 10,000 trillion gigaelectronvolts. This is consistent with ideas for what is termed Grand Unified Theory, the realm where particle physicists believe three of the four fundamental forces in nature can be tied together.

But by associating gravitational waves with an epoch when quantum effects were so dominant, scientists are improving their prospects of one day pulling the fourth force - gravity itself - into a Theory of Everything.

The sensational nature of the discovery means the BICEP2 data will be subjected to intense peer review.

It is possible for the interaction of CMB light with dust in our galaxy to produce a similar effect, but the BICEP2 group says it has carefully checked its data over the past three years to rule out such a possibility.

Other experiments will now race to try to replicate the findings. If they can, a Nobel Prize seems assured for this field of research.

Who this would go to is difficult to say, but leading figures on the BICEP2 project and the people who first formulated inflationary theory would be in the running.

"I can't tell you how exciting this is," said Dr Jo Dunkley, who has been searching through data from the European Planck space telescope for a B-mode signal.

"Inflation sounds like a crazy idea, but everything that is important, everything we see today - the galaxies, the stars, the planets - was imprinted at that moment, in less than a trillionth of a second. If this is confirmed, it's huge."

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26605974

Typhoon, would you be so kind as translating for us what this means?

[Doc]

Cosmic inflation: 'Spectacular' discovery hailed
By Jonathan Amos

Scientists say they have extraordinary new evidence to support a Big Bang Theory for the origin of the Universe.

Researchers believe they have found the signal left in the sky by the super-rapid expansion of space that must have occurred just fractions of a second after everything came into being.

It takes the form of a distinctive twist in the oldest light detectable with telescopes.

The work will be scrutinised carefully, but already there is talk of a Nobel.

"This is spectacular," commented Prof Marc Kamionkowski, from Johns Hopkins University.

"I've seen the research; the arguments are persuasive, and the scientists involved are among the most careful and conservative people I know," he told BBC News.

The breakthrough was announced by an American team working on a project known as BICEP2.

This has been using a telescope at the South Pole to make detailed observations of a small patch of sky.

The aim has been to try to find a residual marker for "inflation" - the idea that the cosmos experienced an exponential growth spurt in its first trillionth, of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.


Gravitational waves from inflation put a distinctive twist pattern in the polarisation of the CMB

Theory holds that this would have taken the infant Universe from something unimaginably small to something about the size of a marble. Space has continued to expand for the nearly 14 billion years since.

Inflation was first proposed in the early 1980s to explain some aspects of Big Bang Theory that appeared to not quite add up, such as why deep space looks broadly the same on all sides of the sky. The contention was that a very rapid expansion early on could have smoothed out any unevenness.

But inflation came with a very specific prediction - that it would be associated with waves of gravitational energy, and that these ripples in the fabric of space would leave an indelible mark on the oldest light in the sky - the famous Cosmic Microwave Background.

The BICEP2 team says it has now identified that signal. Scientists call it B-mode polarisation. It is a characteristic twist in the directional properties of the CMB. Only the gravitational waves moving through the Universe in its inflationary phase could have produced such a marker. It is a true "smoking gun".

"Detecting this signal is one of the most important goals in cosmology today. A lot of work by a lot of people has led up to this point," said Prof John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a leader of the BICEP2 collaboration.

The signal is reported to be quite a bit stronger than many scientists had dared hope. This simplifies matters, say experts. It means the more exotic models for how inflation worked are no longer tenable.

The results also constrain the energies involved - at 10,000 trillion gigaelectronvolts. This is consistent with ideas for what is termed Grand Unified Theory, the realm where particle physicists believe three of the four fundamental forces in nature can be tied together.

But by associating gravitational waves with an epoch when quantum effects were so dominant, scientists are improving their prospects of one day pulling the fourth force - gravity itself - into a Theory of Everything.

The sensational nature of the discovery means the BICEP2 data will be subjected to intense peer review.

It is possible for the interaction of CMB light with dust in our galaxy to produce a similar effect, but the BICEP2 group says it has carefully checked its data over the past three years to rule out such a possibility.

Other experiments will now race to try to replicate the findings. If they can, a Nobel Prize seems assured for this field of research.

Who this would go to is difficult to say, but leading figures on the BICEP2 project and the people who first formulated inflationary theory would be in the running.

"I can't tell you how exciting this is," said Dr Jo Dunkley, who has been searching through data from the European Planck space telescope for a B-mode signal.

"Inflation sounds like a crazy idea, but everything that is important, everything we see today - the galaxies, the stars, the planets - was imprinted at that moment, in less than a trillionth of a second. If this is confirmed, it's huge."

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26605974

Typhoon, would you be so kind as translating for us what this means?

If it holds up it would prove inflation of the early universe. Possibly from Gravity breaking off from the three other forces(CS?) Without inflation our net zero energy universe would have never over come the negative energy of gravity to be a "Big Bang". It also proves that quantum fluctuations were imprinted on the Universe in the first split second that lead to the distribution pattern of matter in the universe we see today. Otherwise mass density would be uniform across the universe. IE No galaxies planets stars etc.. At least that is what I am assuming it means.

[Typhoon]

If the result is confirmed, then it really is a big deal in astrophysics:

1/ First direct evidence for the inflation model of the Big Bang and

2/ Additional indirect evidence for gravitational waves as predicted by GR.

BICEP2 2014 FAQ

There is a fundamental theorem in vector calculus that any vector field, Helmholtz's Decomposition Theorem, can be be decomposed into two independent parts: irrotational and solenoidal

Irrotational:



Solenoidal:



The image from the BICEP2 is of a solenoidal field or B-mode field.

[By coincidence, this theorem is very much in my mind right now for a completely different purpose.]

How this relates to inflation and the Big Bang [a good presentation for laymen]:

A primer on the BICEP2 announcement

Nature New and Comment: a summarized summary

ZJYc9YmKIO8

[Endovelico]

Typhoon,
I'm giving now my first steps in vectorial calculus, which makes me very much aware of how impossible it is for me, at this stage, to understand what you are talking about. I'm not completely blind, but nearly so. I wish I had had the good sense, forty years ago, to go into mathematics. But maybe I will live long enough to be able to start understanding some of the things you talk about.

And, by the way, thanks a lot for the material linked.

[Doc]

Typhoon,
I'm giving now my first steps in vectorial calculus, which makes me very much aware of how impossible it is for me, at this stage, to understand what you are talking about. I'm not completely blind, but nearly so. I wish I had had the good sense, forty years ago, to go into mathematics. But maybe I will live long enough to be able to start understanding some of the things you talk about.

And, by the way, thanks a lot for the material linked.

Yes thanks very much for the link CS. Pretty much everything I know on the subject is self taught. So lots of gaps and misconceptions. My father received a masters degree in Physics in the 1950s right before transistors were invented. A few year before he died he indicated he wished he had used the degree professionally. As it seemed a lot more interesting that what he was doing.

He always talked of particles in a wave guide that mathematically appeared to travel faster than light as they bounced off the sides of the guide. If you understand what I am talking about. I always thought of such particles rightly or wrongly as solitons expanding and contracting as they travel at a given freq.. Traveling as "fuzzy" particles rather than points.

[Doc]

Maybe nine planet after all.
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencen ... 5625.story

New dwarf planet in the Oort cloud changes picture of solar system

Astronomers have announced the discovery of 2012 VP113, a dwarf planet in the inner Oort cloud. It is now the most distant orbit known in our solar system. Three images of the night sky were taken about two hours apart and combined into one.
CAPTIONS

1/3
By Amina Khan

March 26, 2014, 12:53 p.m.

Astronomers searching for the faintest glimmers of light beyond distant Pluto say they’ve discovered a new dwarf planet – and that this planetoid’s movements hint that an invisible giant planet perhaps 10 times the size of Earth could be lurking around the dark fringes of our solar system.

The new dwarf planet 2012 VP-113, described Wednesday in the journal Nature, helps confirm the existence of an “inner Oort cloud” in an interplanetary no man’s land that was once thought to be empty but could potentially be teeming with rocky denizens.

“We had high hopes, and our hopes were confirmed,” said Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science who co-wrote the paper with Chadwick Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii.

2012 VP-113 measures about 280 miles across and comes to within about 80 astronomical units of the sun, or about 7.4 billion miles. (One astronomical unit is the distance between the Earth and the sun.) That’s far beyond the Kuiper belt, an icy field of debris that sits beyond Neptune’s orbit between 30 and 55 astronomical units.

While the dwarf planet is incredibly far out, it’s still not far enough to be part of the Oort cloud, a hypothesized cloud of icy debris that surrounds the solar system’s disc in a spherical shell that stretches a mind-blowing 5,000 to 100,000 astronomical units from the sun. 2012 VP-113’s orbit stretches for a few hundred astronomical units, in what scientists thought was an empty doughnut ring of space between the Oort cloud and the Kuiper belt.

That assumption began to change in 2003 with the discovery of Sedna sitting near the inner edge of this no man’s land. Roughly 600 miles wide, Sedna is big enough to qualify as a dwarf planet. So scientists were puzzled: Was Sedna a freakish one-off, or was it part of a population of rocky bodies in that supposedly empty area – an inner Oort cloud?

An inner Oort cloud would be valuable to study, scientists said, because these objects are so far away from the gravitational pull of either the planets or the distant stars that they’re like a dynamic “fossil” of interplanetary movement in the early solar system.

Sheppard and Trujillo wanted to look for more Sedna-like objects in this area; if they could find more, they’d show that it wasn’t an anomaly.

Looking for such distant, dim objects is not easy. Unlike the distant stars in the night sky, rocks don’t make their own light. So the astronomers have to look for faint, moving glints of reflected sunlight off these distant bodies. That means the sun’s rays have to travel all the way out to this dark, cold interplanetary fringe and then come all the way back to us.

The researchers used the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the NOAO 4-meter telescope in Chile and scanned the sky looking for such dim, slow-moving objects. After months of analysis, the scientists picked up on an intriguing signal in the sky.

“It was the slowest moving thing I’d seen in the discovery process, so immediately I knew it was interesting,” Sheppard said of finding 2012 VP-113. “It was very exciting to know that you’ve discovered this object that’s way out there.”

The scientists estimated that there could be about 1,000 objects in the inner Oort cloud with diameters of 1,000 kilometers or greater – and some of them could be as large as Mars.

What’s more, Sedna and 2012 VP-113 seem to be making their closest approach to the sun at similar angles – which could mean that there’s a giant planet out there, tugging at both of their orbits in the same way. This ghost planet could be from 1 to 20 Earth masses, Sheppard said, though it’s still also possible that the dwarf planets were pulled there by the tug from a passing star in the sun’s early history.

“It’s not a complete explanation, but it’s a possible explanation,” said UCLA astronomer David Jewitt, who first discovered Kuiper belt objects and was not involved in the new discovery.

Astronomers will have to find far more of these distant objects and catch enough of them traveling in the same direction before they can say whether a giant planet is lurking in the inner Oort cloud, Jewitt said.

“It isn’t watertight,” he added, “but it’s very, very interesting.”

[Typhoon]

jfEdEIwhj6s

[Heracleum Persicum]

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Cosmos speed-check probes dark energy

Scientists have produced their most precise measurement yet of the rate at which the early Universe was expanding.

They find that some three billion years after the Big Bang, the cosmos was pushing itself apart by another 1% every 44 million years.

interesting article in BBC

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[noddy]

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-25743806

This, though, would certainly not be the first time this has happened.

Continue reading the main story
“
Start Quote
It's an unusually rapid decline”
End Quote
Prof Mike Lockwood

University of Reading

During the latter half of the 17th Century, the Sun went through an extremely quiet phase - a period called the Maunder Minimum.

Historical records reveal that sunspots virtually disappeared during this time.

Dr Green says: "There is a very strong hint that the Sun is acting in the same way now as it did in the run-up to the Maunder Minimum."

Mike Lockwood, professor of space environment physics, from the University of Reading, thinks there is a significant chance that the Sun could become increasingly quiet.

An analysis of ice-cores, which hold a long-term record of solar activity, suggests the decline in activity is the fastest that has been seen in 10,000 years.

[Endovelico]

To those who care for these things.

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