For the third day in a row, active sunspot 1261 has unleashed a significant M-class solar flare. The latest blast at 0357 UT on August 4th registered M9.3 on the Richter Scale of Flares, almost crossing the threshold into X-territory (X-flares are the most powerful kind). The number of energetic protons around Earth has jumped nearly 100-fold as a result of this event.

The eruption propelled a bright coronal mass ejection (CME) toward Earth. Click on the image to view a movie of the expanding cloud recorded by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory:

Moving at an estimated speed of 1950 km/s, this CME is expected to sweep up two earlier CMEs already en route. Analysts at the GSFC Space Weather Lab say the combined cloud should reach Earth on August 5th at 13:55 UT plus or minus 7 hours: "The impact on Earth is likely to be major. The estimated maximum geomagnetic activity index level Kp is 7 (Kp ranges from 0 - 9). The flanks of the CME may also impact STEREO A, Mars and Mercury/MESSENGER." High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras.  [spaceweather]

• Second moon was absorbed by its sister satellite after the pair crashed at slow speed
  
• New theory may explain why far side of moon has thicker, more mountainous surface

Earth may once have had two moons - the one that shines at night today and a smaller companion, according to a new theory.

A slow-motion collision between the two is believed to have created the mountainous highlands on the moon's far side, as debris from the second, smaller moon piled up. The side of the moon facing the Earth and the side facing away have strikingly different topographies. While the near side is relatively low and flat, the far side is high and mountainous with a much thicker crust.

A powerful flare erupted from the sun this past weekend, but while the storm was not aimed directly at Earth, it was nearly the most powerful type of solar storm there is, scientists say.

The brief but strong solar flare occurred late Friday (July 29) at 10:09 p.m. EDT (0209 GMT July 30), and grew in intensity. The flare was followed by an unrelated geomagnetic storm, which was triggered by fluctuations in the solar wind, according to Spaceweather.com, a website that monitors space weather events.

As a result of the solar storm, skywatchers at high latitudes, particularly in the southern hemisphere, were alerted for potentially dazzling aurora displays. The M9-class flare erupted from a large sunspot, officially known as AR 1261. Two large sunspot groups have emerged on the sun, reported Spaceweather.com, and the active regions are breeding grounds for weak to powerful solar flares.

Some scientists believe bursts of solar activity cause natural disasters on our planet, but until now the star has been too difficult to reach or explore in any detail. Some Russian researchers think they have the solution.

­Volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis – apocalyptic pictures are becoming an ordinary part of news bulletins across the globe. And scientists are not giving out reassuring forecasts.

“Unfortunately, we're expecting more severe cataclysms which may lead to large-scale human losses and destruction,” says Baku-based Professor Elchin Kakhalilov of the Global Network for the Forecasting of Earthquakes. “I'm talking about even a possible shift of the centers of our entire civilization.”

The change in the Earth's seismic activity coincides with the rise of activity on the sun. Scientists have been witnessing gigantic bursts of plasma on its surface and say they are affecting our planet, even though it is over 90 million miles away. [rt.com]

NASA is assessing the risk to spacecraft posed by the upcoming 2011 Draconid meteor shower, a seven-hour storm of tiny space rocks that has the potential to ding major Earth-orbiting spacecraft like the crewed International Space Station and Hubble Space Telescope.

The meteor shower risk assessment is actually more art than science, and there has been some variation in the projected intensity levels of the 2011 Draconids by meteoroid forecasters. But spacecraft operators are already being notified to weigh defensive steps.

Current meteor forecast models project a strong Draconid outburst, possibly a full-blown storm, on Oct. 8, 2011, according to William Cooke of the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

The Draconids do present some risk to spacecraft, Cooke confirmed. They could potentially become the next significant event in low-Earth orbit as far as meteoroids are concerned, he added.

NASA has warned of a once-in-a-lifetime ‘space storm’ after the sun wakes ‘from a deep slumber’ sometime around 2013, causing ‘20 times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina’.

Senior space agency scientists believe that the super storm would hit like ‘a bolt of lightning’ and damage everything from emergency services’ systems, hospital equipment, banking systems and air traffic control devices, through to “everyday” items such as home computers, iPods and Sat Navs.

And unless precautions are taken, it could cause catastrophic consequences for the world’s health, emergency services and national security.

• It will take a spacecraft six months to reach an asteroid
• Nasa yet to decide which space rock would be the best to visit
• Scientists believe civilisation on Earth may depend on mission's success
• Mission is a stepping stone to the dream of flying astronauts to Mars
• Jupiter and Mars probes to be launched in August and 2012 respectively
  

With the space shuttle now history, Nasa's next great mission is so audacious, the agency's best minds are wrestling with how to pull it off.

They have presidential orders to to send astronauts to an asteroid in less than 15 years. The challenges are innumerable, but many Nasa brains are thrilled to have such an improbable assignment - and believe civilisation may even depend on it. [dailymail]

An unmanned NASA probe made history 117 million miles from Earth on Saturday when it arrived at the huge asteroid Vesta, making it the first spacecraft ever to orbit an object in the solar system's asteroid belt.

The Dawn spacecraft entered orbit around Vesta after a four-year chase and will spend about a year studying the huge space rock before moving on to visit another asteroid called Ceres.

Vesta is a huge asteroid about as wide as U.S. state of Arizona, and is also the brightest asteroid in the solar system. It is located in the asteroid belt, a band of rocky objects that encircles the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.  [msnbc ]

A horn from one of the last surviving dinosaurs could finally prove that a massive meteor strike ended the reptiles' reign on Earth.

The 45cm-long fossilised browhorn belonged to a family of plant-eating dinosaurs that included the famous three-horned Triceratops. It was found at a geological site known as the Hell Creek Formation in the bleak badlands of south-east Montana, U.S., where many other dinosaur fossils have been unearthed.

What made this find so remarkable was its location, just 13cm below the rock layer that marks the Cretaceous-Tertiary or 'K-T' boundary - the point in the fossil record where the dinosaurs died.

This suggests dinosaurs were around right up to the time all traces of their existence vanished. Scientist believe they then disappeared suddenly after an abrupt global disaster rather than a slow extinction. [dailymail ]

A string of a dozen volcanoes, at least several of them active, has been found beneath the frigid seas near Antarctica, the first such discovery in that region.

Some of the peaks tower nearly 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) above the ocean floor - nearly tall enough to break the water's surface.

"That's a big volcano. That's a very big volcano. If that was on land it would be quite remarkable," said Philip Leat, a vulcanologist with the British Antarctic Survey who led a seafloor mapping expedition to the region in 2007 and 2010.

The group of 12 underwater mountains lies south of the South Sandwich Islands — desolate, ice-covered volcanoes that rise above the southern Atlantic ocean about halfway between South America and South Africa and erupted as recently as 2008. It's the first time such a large number of undersea volcanoes has been found together in the Antarctic region.

Soon the tempest enveloped the ringed planet, triggering lightning flashes thousands of times more intense than on Earth.

The international Cassini spacecraft and ground telescopes have been tracking the turbulence since last December, visible from Earth as a type of storm known as a “Great White Spot.”

“It’s still going like crazy,” said Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. [ cbslocal ]

One of the biggest disasters we face would begin about 18 hours after the sun spit out a 10-billion-ton ball of plasma - something it has done before and is sure to do again. When the ball, a charged cloud of particles called a coronal mass ejection (CME), struck the Earth, electrical currents would spike through the power grid. Transformers would be destroyed. Lights would go out. Food would spoil and - since the entire transportation system would also be shut down - go unrestocked.

Within weeks, backup generators at nuclear power plants would have run down, and the electric pumps that supply water to cooling ponds, where radioactive spent fuel rods are stored, would shut off. Multiple meltdowns would ensue. “Imagine 30 Chernobyls across the U.S.,” says electrical engineer John Kappenman, an expert on the grid’s vulnerability to space weather. A CME big enough to take out a chunk of the grid is what scientists and insurers call a high-consequence, low-frequency event. Many space-weather scientists say the Earth is due for one soon. Although CMEs can strike anytime, they are closely correlated to highs in the 11-year sunspot cycle. The current cycle will peak in July 2013.  [ popsci ]

An asteroid the size of a tour bus zipped by Earth today (June 27) in a flyby so close that the space rock was nearer to the planet than some satellites.

The space rock, called asteroid 2011 MD, reached its closest point to Earth just after 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT), when it crept within 7,500 miles (12,000 km) of Earth before whipping away again like a slingshot. The asteroid was flying over the southern Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Antarctica, at the time of its closest approach.

The asteroid was discovered just last week on June 22, but there was never any risk of it impacting Earth, NASA scientists said. Astronomers with the LINEAR near-Earth object survey in Socorro, N.M., made the find. [ livescience ]

Here's something to dwell on as you head to work on Monday morning - A small asteroid the size of a tour bus will make an extremely close pass by the Earth at about that time, but it poses no threat to the planet. 

The asteroid will make its closest approach at 9:26 a.m. EDT (1326 GMT) on June 27 and will pass just over 7,500 miles (12,000 kilometers) above the Earth's surface, NASA officials say. At that particular moment, the asteroid — which scientists have named 2011 MD — will be sailing high off the coast of Antarctica, almost 2,000 miles (3,218 km) south-southwest of South Africa.

Asteroid 2011 MD was discovered Wednesday (June 22) by LINEAR, a pair of robotic telescopes in New Mexico that scan the skies for near-Earth asteroids. The best estimates suggest that this asteroid is between 29 to 98 feet (9 to 30 meters) wide. ( click image to enlarge )

Researchers at the University of Leicester are investigating the possible eventual fate of the solar system by examining 'white dwarf' stars elsewhere in our galaxy.

A white dwarf is the last stage in the life cycle of a star like the Sun, after it has contracted to a diameter smaller than that of Earth. Incredibly dense, one teaspoon of white dwarf material would weigh about five tonnes.

Nathan Dickinson, a postgraduate student in the University's Department of Physics and Astronomy, is researching the chemical composition of white dwarfs for his PhD. He is particularly interested in the presence of 'heavy elements' in and around white dwarfs, which are otherwise mainly composed of the two simplest elements, hydrogen and helium. [ SciDay ]

An enormous solar flare expected to hit Britain could blow out the national grid leaving the entire country without electricity, scientists have warned.

Energy Secretary Chris Huhne is considering a raft of options to protect electricity supplies including switching off the national grid entirely causing temporary blackouts.

It is believed that as the sun reaches a peak in activity over the next two years it could unleash a 'class 5' flare, which might knock out computer systems and even throw satellites off course. 

Scientists believe the flare would be up to five times more powerful than one which hit Quebec in 1989 and left six million people without power.

The initial blast from the solar flare could reach the earth in a matter of minutes. This would be followed by a second, potentially more dangerous wave of energy which would take up to three days to arrive.

The next solar cycle - the 11-year pattern when dark spots appear on the sun's surface - may be delayed or even go into "hibernation" for a while, according to US scientists.

But this does not mean a new ice age is coming, said astronomer Frank Hill of the US National Solar Observatory. "We have not predicted a 'little ice age'," Hill said, speaking from an astronomical meeting in New Mexico. "We have predicted something going on with the sun."

Hill and other scientists cited a missing jet stream, fading spots and slower activity near the sun's poles as signs that our nearest star is heading into a rest period.

"This is highly unusual and unexpected," he said. "But the fact that three completely different views of the sun point in the same direction is a powerful indicator that the sunspot cycle may be going into hibernation." [guardian ]

Observations have shown, however, that magnetic effects on Earth due to the sun, effects that cause the aurora to appear, did not go down in synch with the cycle of low magnetism on the sun. Now, a paper in Annales Geophysicae that appeared on May 16, 2011 reports that these effects on Earth did in fact reach a minimum -- indeed they attained their lowest levels of the century -- but some eight months later. The scientists believe that factors in the speed of the solar wind, and the strength and direction of the magnetic fields embedded within it, helped produce this anomalous low. [ SciDay ]

The results of three separate studies seem to show that even as the current sunspot cycle swells toward the solar maximum, the sun could be heading into a more-dormant period, with activity during the next 11-year sunspot cycle greatly reduced or even eliminated.

The results of the new studies were announced today (June 14) at the annual meeting of the solar physics division of the American Astronomical Society, which is being held this week at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. [ space ]

A photo of a sunspot taken in May 2010, with Earth shown to scale. The image has been colorized for aesthetic reasons. This image with 0.1 arcsecond resolution from the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope represents the limit of what is currently possible in terms of spatial resolution.

Sky watchers in the UK will be hoping for a cloudless sky on Wednesday evening so they can get the best view of the longest total lunar eclipse since 2000.

The dramatic event will turn the moon blood red for 100 minutes during the period of totality.

But Nasa warned Europeans will miss the early stages of the eclipse 'because they occur before moonrise.'

The eclipse beings at 6.24pm (BST) and ends at midnight but sunset doesn't occur in the UK until 9.19pm.

People in the eastern half of Africa, the Middle East, central Asia and western Australia will be able to enjoy the entire event. However, those in the U.S will miss out as the eclipse will occur during daylight hours. [ dailymail ]

The Dawn spacecraft is starting to get an eye-full of the Vesta asteroid.The probe expects to reach the 530km-wide body in late July, whereupon it will go into orbit around the rock.

Vesta is what scientists term a protoplanet - a body that never acquired the proportions of "grown-up" planets such as Earth and Mars.

It is nonetheless an impressive object - the second most massive asteroid in the belt of rocky debris that orbits between Mars and Jupiter.

Nasa's (US space agency) Dawn satellite will be spending about 12 months at Vesta before moving on to Ceres which, at 950km in diameter, is by far the largest and most massive body in the asteroid belt.

A massive solar flare which erupted from the surface of the sun on Tuesday is nothing to worry about, says NASA. Although the flare's coronal mass ejection or CME was spectacular, in NASA's words, the accompanying radiation storm fell at the lower end of the scale, with an S1 or minor rating on the five point scale with five being the strongest rating. Indeed the flare itself managed only an M2 or medium rating.

The CME was not directed right at Earth, but should still have an effect on our planet's magnetic field. The CME consists of a magnetic field and plasma. To ground-based observers, that's you and me, the only observable effect is likely to be a brighter aurora borealis in the north and aurora australis in the southern hemisphere, if we happen to be at a high latitude. The increase in solar energetic particles funneled along the lines of the Earth's magnetic field toward the magnetic North and South Poles cause the northern and southern skies to light up as the charged solar wind particles pushed ahead of the CME itself strike atoms in our atmosphere. [ yahoo ]

The sun unleashed a massive solar storm today (June 7) in a dazzling eruption that kicked up a vast cloud of magnetic plasma that appeared to rain back down over half of the sun's entire surface, NASA scientists say.

The solar storm hit its peak at about 2:41 a.m. EDT (0641 GMT), but the actual flare extended over a three-hour period, said C. Alex Young, a solar astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center who runs a website called The Sun Today, in a video describing the event.

"The sun produced a quite spectacular prominence eruption that had a solar flare and high-energy particles associated with it, but I've just never seen material released like this before," Young said. "It looks like somebody just kicked a giant clod of dirt into the air and then it fell back down." [ Video: See the sun's June 7 solar flare and eruption ]

An asteroid the size of a small motorhome zoomed near Earth on Wednesday night, coming closer to us than the moon ever does.

The 23-foot-long (7-meter) space rock, named 2009 BD, came within 215,000 miles (346,000 kilometers) of Earth at around 8:51 p.m. ET. The moon's average distance from us is about 239,000 miles (385,000 kilometers).

2009 BD never threatened to hit Earth on this pass, researchers said. But even if the asteroid had slammed into us, it wouldn't have been a big deal. [ msnbc ]

Experts want the human imprint in the geological record to be acknowledged as a new epoch, the Anthropocene.

These are epoch-making times. Literally. There is now "compelling evidence", according to an influential group of geologists, that humans have had such an impact on the planet that we are entering a new phase of geological time: the Anthropocene.

Millions of years from now, they say, alien geologists would be able to make out a human-influenced stripe in the accumulated layers of rock, in the same way that we can see the imprint of dinosaurs in the Jurassic, or the explosion of life that marks the Cambrian. Now the scientists are pushing for the new epoch to be officially recognised.

"We don't know what is going to happen in the Anthropocene," says geographer Professor Erle Ellis of the University of Maryland. "But we need to think differently and globally, to take ownership of the planet."