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Hi LeAnn,
When I was in high school (and even earlier) astronomy was one of my hobbies. I was in an astronomy club and we would learn about astronomy and have star parties where we would go out an look through telescopes.
So that clearly is related to what I do now, although now I don't do it as a hobby any more - I do enough at work ...
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Hi Hannah,
We have not seen any signs of comets hitting the surface of the Sun - they just seem to burn up in the atmosphere.
Unlike the case with Jupter which was hit by Comet Shoemaker-Levyin 1994: then we could see where the comet hit the cloud tops: http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/sl9/image111.html
The Sun is a lot bigger and hotter then ...
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Hi Kevin,
Generally solar storms don't really hurt the Earth, at least as far as we can tell. They can really effect our technology, though. That meant our technology had to reach a certain level before much damage could be done.
The biggest case on record happened in 1859 - which was also the first record of a solar flare. It was a really ...
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Hi Jeff,
We can see the lines in spectral by spreading the light from the Sun into its different colors. This is what happens in a rainbow, but with spectrographs we can do a lot better. Here is an example - the colors are wrapped around or it would be too long to show. You can see the dark lines.
We also look in other ranges of light - ...
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Hi Olivia,
I know that we have seen relatively high density regions in Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) that we think might be prominences as far out as Earth. It is possible that a spacecraft that has gone out further, like Ulysses or the Voyagers, might have detected something further out, but I don't know about that.
cheers,
Terry
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Hi Chris,
People disagree on this, but it seems to me that the Moon is a relatively close (only a few days away), which makes it a better place to experiment with space colonization that Mars - a round trip there could take a year and a half. If something went wrong we could more likely to be able to help the astronauts out. Once we got the ...
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Hi Karen,
I am not a big expert on this topic, so maybe someone else would have something to say. My guess would be that the Chinese would have been documenting this sort of thing the longest. That is consistant with the information on this web page which discusses ancient solar eclipse ...
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Hi Denise,
We can't know for sure until we observe it, but I think it would be possible. Of course, in general we don't know under what range of conditions life can exist, but even if we consider Earth there are some interesting variations in temperatures and day & night right here. Think about the life near our ...
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Hi Becky,
Sending something actually into the Sun would be very tough - the Sun is so hot that everything there is vaporized. You'd have to be very clever to get around that. At the moment NASA is working on a mission to send a probe about 3.5 million miles from the Sun's surface, which is stll a challenge.
We are ...
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Hi Wendy,
Answering your question in full would take a while - but the short answer is thatyou can get an idea of how hot a star is what color it is. Basically the cooler stars are red. Hotter stars are yellow, white and then blue.
More specifically, we look at how the light is distributed in the Sun's spectra - the spectra is what you ...