Photographs of Mysterious Mechanism of the Sun That Has Baffled Scientists

These images are just incredible. We still know only about 1% of what is "out there" in our solar system and I'll guarantee more surprises in the next few years!

This photo shows a mysterious mechanism of the sun that has baffled scientists for centuries

By Jessica Orwig | Business Insider 

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/photo-shows-sun-exquisite-detail-230800841.html

From 93 million miles away, we earthlings are blissfully unaware of the sheer magnitude of powerful activity roiling on the the sun's surface. But thanks to NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) spacecraft, which has been snapping pictures of the sun for the last five years, we can see this massive monster in action, like in the SDO image below:

(NASA SDO) 

What you're seeing is a representation of one small part of the sun's colossal magnetic field.
The sun's magnetic field is constantly changing unlike Earth's, which means it's growing and shrinking in strength.

Sometimes it can swell to be thousands of times stronger than Earth's. When that happens, it generates black blemishes called sunspots, as shown in the image below:

 
(NASA Goddard on YouTube) Sunspots, like the one shown here are cooler than their surroundings, which is why they appear black. But don't be misled, the typical temperature of a sunspot is 7600 degrees Fahrenheit. If we go back to the first image, what you're seeing are two giant sunspots in blue and yellow. Both are large enough to completely swallow the Earth.

The blue and yellow are false colors — in reality, the sunspots are black.

But these false colors serve an important purpose: The magnetic field of the sunspot in blue has an opposite charge from the sunspot in yellow.

What's happening here is similar to what occurs when you throw a handful of iron filings onto a bar magnet.

The bar magnet has a north and south pole that generates magnetic field lines around it. These fields are completely invisible to the naked eye, but when you sprinkle some iron shavings around it, they actually then outline the fields so you can see them.

The super-hot gas spewing from the solar surface does the same thing: It traces the immensely powerful magnetic field lines connecting the sunspot that acts like the north pole of a bar magnet with the sunspot that represents that south pole.

The most stunning part of this recent SDO image (shown again below) are the white, ethereal wisps — called coronal loops — streaking across the solar surface. These pale whiskers represent hot gas outlining the magnetic field lines connecting the two sunspots.

Although sunspots were first studied in the 16th century by Galileo Galilei — the first scientist to observe the universe through a telescope — researchers are still unsure how these pockets of intense magnetic activity generate sunspots. But with SDO and its more than 100 million pictures taken over the last five years, scientists are hopeful that they will uncover the mysterious mechanism behind these enigmatic spots.

(NASA SDO)

430,000-Year-Old Murder Victim Discovered?

mmmmmmmmmmmmmm
By Tia Ghose | LiveScience.com 

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/430-000-old-murder-victim-discovered-110806310.html#n2lRa1Q

• A 430,000-year-old partial skull unearthed in a bone pit in Spain may have belonged …

Age: unknown. Sex: unknown. Cause of death: blunt force trauma. Time of Death: 430,000 B.C., give or take a few thousand years.

Archaeologists may have unearthed one of the world's oldest cold cases — a skull fragment found in a Spanish cave from an ancient murder victim whose head was bashed in.

The skull was first unearthed in the Atapuerca Mountains, which are threaded by a series of limestone caves, sinkholes and tunnels. In 1987, researchers scrambled down a chimney into one of those caves to discover a giant bone bed.

The site, known as Sima de los Huesos, or "pit of the bones," harbors thousands of skeletal fragments from at least 28 individuals from multiple Homo species, including Homo heidelbergensis and a mysterious Homo species known only as the Sima de los Huesos hominin. Scientists don't know exactly why so many bodies were buried in this region, but many have speculated that it is one of the world's oldest burial pits.

"The bodies were deposited at the site by other members of the social group," study co-author Nohemi Sala, a paleontologist at the Carlos III Health Institute in Madrid, speculated.

Scientists excavating at the site first found a skull fragment in 1990, but it wasn't until years later that they found other matching pieces of the skull. After many years, Sala and her colleagues painstakingly reconstructed the skull, revealing two holes poked through it. The skull belonged to a young adult of unknown sex and human species.

To solve this ancient murder mystery, the team analyzed the chemical makeup and structure of the bone around the holes, and found the head wounds had not healed before death, suggesting the man or woman died of his injuries.

While it's possible that the "person" took a tumble down the chimney and bashed his head on a limestone boulder, it's unlikely he could have sustained two such wounds through an accidental fall, the researchers wrote in their paper, which was published today (May 27) in the journal PLOS ONE. In addition, the slow settling of the ground over hundreds of thousands of years didn't produce enough energy to cause the person's head wounds, Sala added.

That left one logical conclusion: murder.

"Based on the similarities in shape and size of both the wounds, we believe they are the result of repeated blows with the same object and inflicted by another individual, perhaps in a face-to-face encounter," Sala said. "We are not sure what the object was. However, possibilities include a wooden spear or a stone hand ax."

While ancient hominins may have cannibalized and butchered each other, there has been relatively little evidence for people using deadly force against other humans during the Paleolithic. At Shanidar Cave in Iraq, scientists have found a Neanderthal with a wound around his ribs, but that wound healed and was probably not lethal, the researchers wrote. In Sungir Cave in Russia, a skeleton bears a deadly spine fracture clearly caused by violence, but that could have been the result of a hunting accident, the researchers wrote.

The Skeptic