"Impossible" Lunar Eclipse Happening Tonight

Lunar eclipses happen quite often.  There was one in April, and there are two more occurring in the near future.  There's one happening early Wednesday morning, October 8th.  This one is going to be different, and strictly speaking, impossible.  For a brief period of time along the eastern U.S., it will be possible to view both the lunar eclipse and the sun rising at the same time.  Since a lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth is directly in between the moon and the sun, this shouldn't happen, and if there was no atmosphere, it wouldn't.  But thanks to refraction from the atmosphere as the sun rises and the moon sets, the light from both objects will be visible for several minutes while both in the sky.  The light from the moon will be hanging around after it has set, and light from the sun will appear before it has actually risen.

It promises to be a unique astronomical experience, and I'm actually going to be awake for it.  Unfortunately, it's probably going to be cloudy, so I won't be able to see it.  Which is annoying.  Thanks a lot, weather.

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The Most Important Science News You've Heard in the Last Five Minutes

I could spend this post talking about how half of all Earth's wildlife has died since 1960, everybody else certainly is.  It's a big number, but honestly?  Not that surprising.  I guess it's good to have a number on just how much of nature we've killed off, but it didn't take a genius to know it was a lot.  No, today, I'm going to talk about something much more important in the world of science: gigantic solar flares.

When I say gigantic, I mean it.  These flares, coming from DG Canum Venaticorum, a red dwarf binary system 60 light years away, are the biggest ever recorded.  It was about 10,000 times more powerful than our sun's meager flares, reaching a temperature of 360 million degrees.  The stars are young, only about 30 million years old, but the key to the flare was the rotational period of the flare star.  It orbits in about a day, while the Sun takes about a month.  Fast rotation means more magnetic  activity, which leads to more powerful solar flares.  That's how a piddling little red dwarf produced the most powe
rful solar flare ever.

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