From a distance, the sun may seem calm and steady. But zoom in, and our home star is actually in a perpetual state of flux, transforming over time from a uniform sea of fire to a chaotic jumble of warped plasma and back again in a recurring cycle.

Every 11 years or so, the sun's magnetic field gets tangled up like a ball of tightly wound rubber bands until it eventually snaps and completely flips — turning the north pole into the south pole and vice versa. In the lead-up to this gargantuan reversal, the sun amps up its activity: belching out fiery blobs of plasma, growing dark planet-size spots and emitting streams of powerful radiation.


This period of increased activity, known as solar maximum, is also a potentially perilous time for Earth, which gets bombarded by solar storms that can disrupt communications, damage power infrastructure, harm some living creatures (including astronauts) and send satellites plummeting toward the planet.

2023 has not been a good year for noctilucent clouds (NLCs). First, NASA's iconic AIM spacecraft broke, losing power when its main battery failed. We could no longer see noctilucent clouds from space. Next, the clouds themselves failed.

"As we have have passed Summer Solstice, the NLC season still has not started for me," laments Ruslan Merzlyakov, who usually photographs many NLCs from his home in Jutland, Denmark. "I made this new film to share my experience trying to photograph them."

NLCs are clouds of frosted meteor smoke. They form every year in summer when wisps of water vapor rise up to the edge of space. At altitudes greater than 80 km, the water crystallizes around disintegrated meteoroids, forming electric-blue structures visible in the night sky.

Meteorologist Rodney Chai has seen a lot. As lead meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Burlington, Vt., he has dealt with his fair share of wild weather. But when he glanced at the setting sun from the Outer Banks of North Carolina earlier this month, he spotted something new. Chai snapped a photo of an "omega sun," also known as an "Etruscan vase." In his photo, the sun appears to have morphed into a shape reminiscent of a cartoon keyhole. The solar disc resembles a circle balanced atop another circle.

What was actually happening was an "inferior mirage," the product of sunlight being bent upward by a layer of warm air over the water. Contrary to popular belief, mirages are not relegated to hot arid deserts, and instead frequently appear over bodies of water where air temperature varies considerably with height. That can bend, or refract, light, distorting what we see. The result? A picture-perfect peachy omega, sunny side up.

Earth's thermosphere recently hit a near 20-year temperature peak after soaking up energy from geomagnetic storms that bashed Earth this year. The temperature in the second-highest layer of the atmosphere will likely continue to climb over the next few years as the sun's activity ramps up, which could impact Earth-orbiting satellites, experts warn.


The thermosphere extends from the top of the mesosphere, at around 53 miles (85 kilometers) above ground, to the bottom of the exosphere, which begins at around 372 miles (600 km) above the ground, according to NASA. Beyond the exosphere is outer space.

For more than 21 years, NASA has measured the thermosphere temperature via infrared radiation emitted by carbon dioxide and nitric oxide molecules. Scientists convert data collected by NASA's Thermosphere, Ionosphere, Mesosphere, Energetics and Dynamics (TIMED) satellite, into the Thermosphere Climate Index (TCI), which is measured in terawatts, or TW. (1 TW is equal to 1 trillion watts.)

I came across an article with a provocative headline, "Scientists Link Cosmic Radiation to Earthquakes for the First Time".

So I went to look at the underlying study, Observation of large scale precursor correlations between cosmic rays and earthquakes with a periodicity similar to the solar cycle by P. Homola and 43 others.

Hmmm, sez I. Willis's Rule of Authors says that the strength of a scientific study is inversely proportional to the number of authors ... but I digress. The Abstract says:

The search for correlations between secondary cosmic ray detection rates and seismic effects has long been a subject of investigation motivated by the hope of identifying a new precursor type that could feed a global early warning system against earthquakes.

Here we show for the first time that the average variation of the cosmic ray detection rates correlates with the global seismic activity to be observed with a time lag of approximately two weeks, and that the significance of the effect varies with a periodicity resembling the undecenal solar cycle, with a shift in phase of around three years, exceeding 6 σ at local maxima.

The precursor characteristics of the observed correlations point to a pioneer perspective of an early warning system against earthquakes.

The study says:

Here we report on an observation of the correlations between variation of the average rates of secondary cosmic ray fluxes measured locally and global seismic activity, and we also point to the periodicity of these correlations (or their observability) which corresponds to sunspot number observations back to the 1960s.

They describe their method as:

... an alternative, novel approach on which we report here: comparing the absolute average variabilities of secondary cosmic radiation to the average global sum of earthquake magnitudes.

And their conclusion was:

We have demonstrated for the first time that the variation of the absolute average detection rates of secondary cosmic radiation correlates with the global seismic situation (sum of the magnitudes of earthquakes with magnitudes greater-than or equal to 4, occurring at all locations) that takes place approximately two weeks later than the relevant cosmic ray data. The size of the shift in time between the cosmic and seismic data sets reveals the precursor character of the correlation effect.

Worried about flying? Things may be getting bumpier for you, a new study suggests aviation turbulence is worsening with climate change.

Research from the University of Reading shows that the skies that aircraft fly through today is much more unstable than 40 years ago.

Over the North Atlantic, one of the busiest flight paths in the world, the time spent in severely turbulent air has risen from 17.7 hours in 1979 to 27.4 hours in 2020, a 55% increase.

The data focused on clean-air flights, where other forms of turbulence were not present.

Moderate bouts of turbulence rose by 37% while light turbulence is up by 17%.

Much of northern England enjoyed a rare optical display on Sunday evening.

Thin, high cloud gave a spectacular show of halos, arcs and upside-down rainbows across the North East and Cumbria, not often seen together in the UK.

The phenomena are caused by sunlight reflecting and refracting through ice crystals high in the atmosphere.

BBC Look North weather presenter Jennifer Bartram said it was "very unusual".

"The particular angle at which the sunlight hits these high-up ice crystals form these patterns," she said.

Since what has come to be known as the Great Dimming that took place in the latter half of 2019 and early 2020, the red giant star Betelgeuse just will not stop with the wackiness.

The dying star's regular cycles of brightness fluctuation have changed, and now Betelgeuse has grown uncharacteristically bright. At the time of writing, it was sitting at 142 percent of its normal brightness.

It's been fluctuating back and forth on a small scale but on a steady upward trend for months and hit a recent peak of 156 percent in April.

Currently, Betelgeuse is the 7th brightest star in the sky - up from its normal position as the 10th brightest, triggering speculation that Betelgeuse is about to blow in a spectacular supernova.

Sadly, it probably isn't. Although Betelgeuse is on the brink of death in cosmic timescales, on human timescales, its supernova could be 100,000 years away.

According to scientists, its current behavior is more likely a bit of ongoing wobbliness following the 2019 dimming, and the star will return to normal within a decade.

Betelgeuse, located around 700 light-years from Earth, is one of the most interesting stars in the sky. It hangs above us, glowing like a bloodshot eye, a star in the red giant stage that marks the end of its life.

But Betelgeuse is an uncommon type of star, even for a red giant. Once upon a time, it was an absolute monster: a blue-white O-type star, the most massive stellar weight class.

Astronomers are scrambling to photograph a new supernova in the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101). "This is best supernova in a decade," says Eliot Herman of Tucson, Arizona. "It has tripled in brightness in only 24 hours."
At this rate, it will soon rival or outshine the spiral galaxy's core.

Astronomer Yvette Cendes of Harvard's Center for Astrophysics says the supernova should continue to brighten for another day or so. "We think it will peak around magnitude +10, although it is hard to be certain."

Europeans are still trying to wrap their minds around what happened after sunset on April 23, 2023. Everyone knew that a CME was coming; photographers were already outside waiting for auroras. But when the auroras appeared, they were very strange.

"I had never seen anything quite like it," says Heiko Ulbricht of Saxony, Germany. "The auroras began to tear themselves apart, pulsating as they formed individual blobs that floated high in the sky."

"It literally took my breath away," he says. "My pulse was still racing hours later!" The same blobs were sighted in France and Poland, and in Denmark they were caught flashing like a disco strobe light.