How We're Still Trying to Shed Light on Persistent Solar Mysteries
After staring at the sun for hundreds of millennia, humans still have burning questions about it Yesterday, the vernal equinox, the sun returned to the Northern Hemisphere at last. Nothing here or anywhere else in our corner of the galaxy would exist without the sun, yet a surprising number of solar mysteries persist. Much of heliophysics is focused on "space weather," predicting what the sun will do. That's because solar flares and coronal mass ejections spew charged particles and radiation into space, occasionally toward Earth. These seething bursts of energy can jeopardize telecommunications on the ground and in space, not to mention the lives of astronauts. But there are plenty of other, perhaps more profound, burning questions: how does the star actually work? What's inside it? What, exactly, it is belching out at us? Check out our gallery of some burning questions about the sun. Ephraim Fischbach, a physics professor at Purdue University,...