Nature Hub

 From - Sky & Telescope By  Bob King, Edited by - Amal Udawatta, Towering red rays and green arcs explode across the northwestern sky during the height of an auroral display on February 15–16, 2023, over Duluth, Minnesota. Increasing solar activity as the Sun heads toward solar maximum (predicted for July 2025) bode well for aurora-watching. Bob King After a gradual decline in solar activity over the past few solar cycles, the current Cycle 25 appears to be bucking the trend and spawning more sunspots than originally anticipated. I can attest to the increase. Regular checks with my #14 welder's glass have netted naked-eye sunspots nearly every month since last spring. Escalating solar activity is often tied to more frequent and intense aurora sightings with displays penetrating deep into U.S. mid-latitudes. Naked-eye sunspots and sunspot groups (circled) speckled the Sun from April through early December 2022. The trend has continued into 2023. Sunspots are cooler regions on th

 From  Sky & Telescope, By  - ASS NOVA, Edited by - Amal Udawatta, Artist's impression of a star orbited by five planets. NASA / JPL-Caltech Astronomers have just taken a closer look at an unusual system containing three stars and at least five planets. In doing so they may have solved a mystery around its formation. The system, known as Kepler-444, is also around 11 billion years old, showing that such systems can be stable over a significant fraction of the universe’s current age. ONE SYSTEM, THREE STARS, FIVE PLANETS Located 117 light-years away toward the constellation Lyra, the system is centered around the K0 star Kepler-444 A. Then there’s a tight-knit binary pair of M-type stars orbiting it some 66 astronomical units away (known as Kepler-444 BC). A quintet of planets also orbits Kepler-444 A. All five worlds have radii between 0.4 and 0.7 Earth radius, and every one has an orbital period under 10 days. Typical observation of the central star Kepler-444 A and the binary

  By Natasha Booty BBC News, Edited by - Amal Udawatta, IMAGE SOURCE, JOHN C MITTERMEIER Image caption, It is said to be the first documented spotting since 1999 Bird lovers are celebrating after a species some feared extinct was spotted alive by scientists for the first time in 24 years. The dusky tetraka is a songbird with a distinctive yellow throat that is native to Madagascar. Three of them have been sighted in a rainforest in the island's north-east, but in an unexpected habitat. The ground-dwelling birds were in thick vegetation near a rocky river - perhaps a good spot to find grubs and insects. "If dusky tetraka always prefer areas close to rivers, this might help to explain why the species has been overlooked for so long," says ornithologist John Mittermeier from the American Bird Conservancy, who managed to take a photo of the rare bird. The sighting of the dusky tetraka comes little over a year since  it was called one of the 10 most-wanted birds on the "S

  From - Earth  Unreal Edited by - Amal Udawatta, The Morpho butterfly (Morpho peleides) is a dazzling species of butterfly known for its iridescent blue wings. However, what many people do not know is that the eggs of the Morpho butterfly are just as intriguing as the adult butterfly. Morpho peleides lays small eggs, which are about 1-2 mm in diameter, smooth, hemispherical, and deposited on the upper surface of leaves. These eggs are light green and have a circular band of small brown spots near the top. The duration of the egg stage varies between 7 to 16 days, depending on the subspecies. Text credit: Earth Unreal Photo credit: Alex Wild (portfolio in the comments)

  From - The Science Times By -  Margaret Davis   Edited by - Amal Udawatta (Photo : MARIO TAMA/POOL/AFP via Getty Images) A member of the US Air Force deploys a weather ballon aboard the USS. Portland before the NASA's Orion capsule descended to splash down in the Pacific Ocean off Baja California, Mexico, on December 11, 2022. Recently, mysterious balloons have been flying over North America and the US Air Force has shot them down for security reasons. The balloons were believed to be Chinese surveillance vessels initially observed flying American territory in early February. But apart from these balloons, there are some emotional fatalities as well.  Futurism  reports that a solar geoengineering start-up that aims to dim the sun is worried that its balloons might get shot down as well. (Photo : MARIO TAMA/POOL/AFP via Getty Images) A member of the US Air Force deploys a weather ballon aboard the USS. Portland before the NASA's Orion capsule descended to splash down in the Pa

  From Sky &  Night By -  Iain Todd , Edited by - Amal Udawatta, X-ray and optical view of colliding dwarf galaxies Elstir & Vinteuil Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Alabama/M. Micic et al.; Optical: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA Astronomers have found evidence of giant  black holes  in distant dwarf galaxies that appear to be on a collision course with one another. Observing the dwarf galaxies in x-ray, infrared and visible light, the team have been able to spot two separate pairs of black holes that seem destined to collide. Dwarf galaxies are  galaxies  that contain a total mass less than 3 billion times that of our Sun, as opposed to the roughly 60 billion Suns’ mass of our galaxy the Milky Way. Dwarf galaxies are thought to have been abundant in the early Universe, hundreds of millions of years after the  Big Bang . The theory is that they merged with each other over time to form the large scale galactic structures we see today. While astronomers have