Author: Ralph Crewe

The Sun, as it turns out, is a pretty big deal. The thermonuclear behemoth at the center of the solar system makes up well over 99% of all the mass in the solar system. Despite being the most well-studied star in the universe, there are still many mysteries about its works. 

One of the Sun’s mysteries is the nature of sunquakes, massive ripples traveling thousands of kilometers across the sun’s surface. Occasionally, when a solar flare erupts, so-called seismic transients can be seen rippling through the solar surface over the next hour. The energy source driving these ripples was thought to be either the transient heating of the solar atmosphere during the flare event or by the powerful flexing of magnetic flux applied directly to the photosphere(the sun’s visible surface) itself, also originating in the flare event above. Using data from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), scientists have published a paper in the Astrophysical Journal of Letters that, for the first time, describes submerged sources of transient acoustic emission (sunquakes). The source of these mysterious waves seems to be, as it turns out, a thousand kilometers deep below, in the churning, seething hot interior of the star.

For only the second time in history, astronomers have discovered a new, natural-origin, minimoon orbiting the Earth. The minimoon, known as 2020CD3 (CD3 for short), was first discovered by Kacper Werizchos and Teddy Pruyne using data from the Catalina Sky Survey. Once CD3’s orbit was determined to be geo-centric, Queens University Belfast Post-Doctoral Research Fellow Dr. Grigori Fedorets assembled a team of 23 astronomers worldwide to make careful observations of the object to determine its identity. Based on the team’s findings, a paper was published on November 24, 2020, in the Astronomical Journal, characterizing the minimoon.