Astronomers using one of the most sensitive arrays of radio telescopes in the world have caught a huge storm erupting on the sun and observed material flung from it at more than 3000 kilometres a second, a massive shockwave and phenomena known as herringbones.

In the journal Nature Astronomy, Diana Morosan from the University of Helsinki in Finland and her colleagues report detailed observations of the huge storm, a magnetic eruption known as a coronal mass ejection (CME).

Unlike the herringbones a biologist might find while dissecting, well, a herring, the team found a data-based version while dissecting the radio waves emitted during the violent event.

The shape of the fish skeleton emerged when they plotted the frequencies of radio waves as the CME evolved. The spine is a band of emission at a constant frequency, while the vertical offshoot "bones" on either side were sudden short bursts of radiation at a much wider range of frequencies.

Herringbones have been found in the sun's radio-wave entrails before, but this is the first time that such a sensitive array of radio telescopes has recorded them. The detailed data enabled Morosan and colleagues for the first time to pin down the origin of the radiation bursts.

To their surprise, the bones were being created in three different locations, on the sides of the CME.

"I was very excited when I first saw the results, I didn't know what to make of them," Morosan says.

Broome Police in Western Australian shared the spooky CCTV footage on Twitter yesterday - which quickly gained global attention.

The 15-second video begins with flashes of lightning bursting through the skies during a thunderstorm.

Suddenly, a spark of lightning reveals an unidentified object appearing out of the clouds.

The circular-UFO swiftly floats in mid-air before gliding off screen, leaving an almost transparent trail

An optical phenomenon known as a solar halo, or a sun dog, has been caught on camera in China. Video footage courtesy of CCTV can be viewed here.

Residents of Russia's Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug observed "three suns" in the sky on Wednesday morning, the product of a halo which is created when sunlight interacts with ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere.

An optical phenomenon known as a halo made it seem like there were three suns in the skies of Russia's Yamal, however, this mysterious marvel is not rare in the region, a hydrometeorology curator, Artem Koshkin, told Sputnik.

According to him, halos and similar phenomena occur due to a combination of factors, but mainly depend on the condensation of little particles in the atmosphere.

A 'capped inversion' trapped air pollutants near the ground

Despite a steep downward trend in the number of days with poor air quality over the last several years, residents of Washington, D.C., and Baltimore awoke Feb. 4 to thick haze and warnings about unhealthy levels of air pollution. As a result, authorities issued a code-orange alert, urging sensitive groups such as children, the elderly and those with asthma, heart disease or lung disease to limit outdoor activities.

Why would a region used to grappling with air-quality alerts in the muggy days of summer find itself stuck with one in the middle of winter? The cause is a weather phenomenon called a "capped inversion," which under the right conditions prevents ground-based pollutants from drifting away into the upper atmosphere.

Nowhere to go

Normally, air is warmest near the surface and cools as it rises through the atmosphere. In this scenario, air pollutants are emitted and able to mix and spread through this unstable mass of air flowing between warm and cool areas.

A capped inversion occurs when a less dense mass of warm air moves over a dense, cold mass. In the case of the Washington-Baltimore region, a recent cold spell and fresh snowfall on Feb. 1, coupled with the arrival of extremely warm air over the weekend (high temperatures on Feb. 4 reached nearly 65 degrees Fahrenheit, or 18 Celsius), created ideal inversion conditions. As a result, any pollutants emitted during that time stayed close to the ground, elevating the level of particulates in the air and triggering a code-orange alert.

"The fresh snow traps cold air near the surface very well," Joel Dreessen, a meteorologist with Maryland's Department of Environment, said in an email to the Washington Post. "Particles jumped dramatically Saturday (in comparison to Friday) due to the inversion which set up. This very stout near-surface inversion was/is in place through Monday due to ongoing high pressure in the region."

New studies at Northumbria University, Newcastle, show that the sun's magnetic waves behave differently than previously thought.

Their results were reported in Nature Astronomy,

After examining the data collected over a 10-year period, Northumbria's team from the Department of Mathematics, Physics and Electrical Engineering found that magnetic waves in the Sun's corona - the outermost layer of the atmosphere - react to sound waves escaping from the inside of the Sun.

These magnetic waves, known as Alfvenic waves, play a crucial role in transporting energy around the Sun and solar system. It was assumed that the waves were created on the solar surface, where boiling hydrogen reaches temperatures of 6,000 degrees and churns the sun's magnetic field.

However, the researchers have found evidence that the magnetic waves also react - or are excited - higher in the atmosphere by sound waves leaking out from the inside of the sun.

The team discovered that the sound waves leave a distinctive marker on the magnetic waves. The presence of this marker means that the sun's entire corona is shaking in a collective manner in response to the sound waves. This is causing it to vibrate over a very clear range of frequencies.

A sun dog was seen in a sunny field near Graceville, Minnesota yesterday (February 4) when the filmer noticed an upside-down rainbow forming above the solar phenomenon in this breathtaking clip.


The "rainbow" was caused by a circumzenithal arc, where ice crystals in the higher atmosphere refract sunlight depending on the angle of the sun, creating this bright and colorful bow in the sky.

This video shows the moment a young man captures a rare phenomenon called a sun halo.

A Twitter user going by the name of @Bnguyen24 panned his camera towards the sky above a palm tree-lined street in Malaysia to show the blazing sun with a huge ring around it.

One user reacting to the video, said: 'I saw this in Cuba and thought the world was ending.'


The deep freeze gripping the Midwest of America also created the spectacle - also known as 'sun dogs' - thousands of miles away from Malaysia.

As temperatures plunged as low as -42F in Park Rapids, Minnesota and -31F in Fargo, North Dakota, sun dogs were spotted throughout the upper Midwest on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The National Weather Service in the US describes the phenomenon as colored spots of light that appear on either side of the sun due to the refraction of light through ice crystals.

They are located approximately 22 degrees either left, right, or both, from the sun, depending on where the ice crystals are present.

Sub-zero temperatures in West Michigan led to many residents spotting a "sun dog" phenomenon that made it look as though there were two extra suns in the sky.

Photos snapped Thursday morning in various locations on the lower west side of the state show the sun being flanked by two illusion suns caused by the refraction of sunlight off ice crystals in the atmosphere.

The illusion was spotted as temperatures in the area were below -10 degrees for the second consecutive day.

The National Weather Service said the ice crystals also created a "sun pillar" above the sun that is visible in some photographs.

Viewers from across the region are sending us stunning shots of "sun dogs" in the sky.

The phenomenon is caused by the refraction of sunlight off ice crystals in the atmosphere.