Saturday, July 30, 2011

Two fascinating things we learned this week

1. There is a "trojan asteroid" hanging out, in orbit with us, in one of our Lagrange points. It has a very odd, but stable, fluctuation in its orbit. There's been another world in our neighborhood and we're just finding out about it - I think that's pretty cool.

2. You know how they always taught you that the Sun's atmosphere was hotter than its surface, but no one knew why? Now we think we might know why. Well, we think we may have new evidence that makes a source of heat we knew about before 100 times stronger than we thought: Alfven waves, or magnetic waves carrying energy from the Sun's core.

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