A series of Phoenix-shaped clouds impressed bystanders as they appeared in the sky over the Ukraine.

Video shared to AOL showed the strange, wispy cloud formations which resembled the mythical birds, as they floated over the skies of Odessa.

Children can also be heard shouting in amazement at the unusual sight just above the cities skyline.

The footage taken on Sunday also features the sun peeking over the horizon granting an orange tint to the bizarre clouds, causing them to resemble the phoenix's flaming feathers.

Earth's magnetosphere, an invisible and highly-charged atmospheric layer that protects life on the planet from external radiation, was briefly cracked, Indian scientists have revealed, after analyzing a powerful geomagnetic storm from last year that was caused by the Sun.

The blast was registered in June 2015 after a huge cloud of plasma released from the Sun struck the Earth at a speed of some 2.5 million kph.

The report in Physical Review Letters states that the impact of the solar storm caused the Earth's magnetic shield to compress, leading to massive geomagnetic atmospheric anomalies. Storm effects included aurora borealis and radio signal interruptions across several continents.

An uncommon atmospheric phenomenon shone next to the sun, above the Lake on Tuesday.

As the sun approached the horizon at the end of an uncommonly warm November day, a "sun dog" could be seen. The photo above was taken near Horseshoe Bend.

Sun dogs are also known as "mock suns" or "phantom suns" and are created when sunlight reflects off ice crystals in the atmosphere. They can appear on both sides of the sun, often when it is close to the horizon.

Residents and drivers around the mid-state Tuesday evening were treated to a very cool meteorological phenomenon known as a sundog.

The patch of light in the sky seen on either side of the setting sun was caused by sunlight refracted by ice crystals says FOX 17 Chief Meteorologist Katy Morgan.

According to Live Science, the crystals sink through the air and become vertically aligned, refracting the sunlight horizontally, causing the sundog. Sundogs in the science community are called parhelia, which stems from the Greek word parelion that means "beside the sun."

There is a sundog on either side of the sun when the phenomenon occurs. Depending on your vantage point, you were able to see one or both as the sun set yesterday evening.

There was an unusual sight in the sky Wednesday afternoon in Toone, Tennessee. Many citizens looked up and saw an upside down rainbow.

It was a beautiful sight but not one that many have seen before. Typically a rainbow is seen after it rains; the rainbow is typically arched downward toward the ground.

That was not the case Wednesday, and that's because what people saw in the sky was not technically a rainbow: it was a circumzenithal arc.

It's formed by ice crystal in the upper levels of the atmosphere. As light from the sun shines through the crystals it is refracted to form an arc around the sun.

This phenomenon is most common with a full halo around the sun or moon when high level clouds are present. The arc seen Wednesday didn't form a complete arc around the sun because ice crystals were only present at that particular altitude and angle to the sun, but there was just enough to create an unusually beautiful sight to those who saw it.

Several newly discovered objects on the outskirts of the solar system suggest that something strange is afoot. While some scientists point to the odd behavior of the newfound residents as further proof for the existence of the hypothetical Planet Nine (a yet-unseen super Earth proposed to inhabit the outskirts) not everyone is convinced.

The new inhabitants include a small icy world with one of the longest known orbits and several smaller objects clustered together extremely far from the sun.

The newest of these objects is L91, an icy world that can travel as far from the sun as 1430 astronomical units (AU), or 1,430 times the Earth-sun distance, one of the longest known orbital periods. L91 never draws closer to the sun than 50 AUs, farther away than even Pluto.

And L91's distant path is shifting.

"It's orbit is changing in quite a remarkable way," astrophysicist Michele Bannister told scientists last week at the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences in Pasadena, California. Bannister, an astrophysicist at Queen's University Belfast, identified minute changes in the object's orbit that could come from the passing gravity of other stars or interactions with the hypothetical Planet Nine. Simulations by the team suggest that the tiny tugs are more likely to come from beyond the solar system, whether distant stars or galactic winds.

Konstantin Batygin, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, said, "I think it's a story that's not implausible, but I also think it's not needed." Batygin, who announced the existence of Planet Nine last January, thinks the unusual orbits of L91 and other newfound objects are more likely explained by the hypothetical planet.

Bannister and her team spotted L91 using the Outer Solar System Origins Survey, a 4-year survey hunting distant moving objects using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. L91's mass and size remains unknown.

"It's right at the limit of what we could actually detect in the sky," Bannister said.

A nova in Sagittarius, discovered a few nights ago by a Japanese amateur, has become bright enough to see in binoculars.
Just in the nick for time — at least for northern observers — a bright nova has been discovered in Sagittarius. I say "nick of time" because the constellation is sinking in the southwestern sky right after dusk, affording only a short viewing window from mid-northern latitudes. But a window it is, and there's still time to snatch a view of this amazing stellar explosion. Just make sure to look right after the end of twilight. That means about an hour and a half after your local sunset time.
Well-known nova hunter Koichi Itagaki of Japan nabbed the "new star" on October 20th, using a 180-mm telephoto lens to take sky-patrol photos. At the time it was only about 11th magnitude. But within two days, the star shot up an additional three magnitudes and now shines brighter than 8.0. That puts it within range of 50-mm binoculars and any telescope you might have.

Five years ago, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three astronomers for their discovery, in the late 1990s, that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace.

Their conclusions were based on analysis of Type Ia supernovae - the spectacular thermonuclear explosion of dying stars - picked up by the Hubble space telescope and large ground-based telescopes. It led to the widespread acceptance of the idea that the universe is dominated by a mysterious substance named 'dark energy' that drives this accelerating expansion.

Now, a team of scientists led by Professor Subir Sarkar of Oxford University's Department of Physics has cast doubt on this standard cosmological concept. Making use of a vastly increased data set - a catalogue of 740 Type Ia supernovae, more than ten times the original sample size - the researchers have found that the evidence for acceleration may be flimsier than previously thought, with the data being consistent with a constant rate of expansion.

The study is published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports.

Professor Sarkar, who also holds a position at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, said, "The discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe won the Nobel Prize, the Gruber Cosmology Prize, and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. It led to the widespread acceptance of the idea that the universe is dominated by "dark energy" that behaves like a cosmological constant - this is now the "standard model" of cosmology."

This unusual shaped cloud has been spotted in the sky over South Carolina.

Cory Hearn captured the rare weather phenomenon on camera, which appears in the shape of an angel with its wings spread wide.

Speaking on the footage, Cory says: "Check that out. Is that not an angel or what?"

"Nobody would believe me if I didn't do this live but I want you to look at this cloud in the sky.

"I don't know that I've ever seen with my own two eyes this type of cloud. Isn't it amazing?

"I'm seeing an angel, I don't know if anybody sees anything different."

He later told People that it was the most amazing thing he'd ever seen in my life.

© newburytoday.co.uk

Loud bang 'was not thunder' - was it a meteor?

A huge bang which startled people in Thatcham last night (Sunday) could have been caused by a meteor, some have speculated.

Last night's boom sent several people out into the street expecting to see a plume of smoke from an explosion.

The earth-shattering noise was accompanied by a flash which lit up living rooms, prompting many to assume it was a single, extraordinarily loud, clap of thunder.

But one poster on social media wrote: "So now the met office don't know what the loud noise was."

Others speculated it might have been a meteor like the one which caused a blinding flash and loud boom in Arizona, USA, in June.

What's your theory? Let us know via the comments section below.