Science mysteries… explained!!! Today’s question is for all you sci fi fans out there… How did the Sun form? That’s definitely an age-old science mystery… billions of years old in fact. For many years, scientists thought that our Sun formed when another giant star collapsed, or went supernova. This star would have been about thirty times as heavy as our own Sun. So what’s the new science news scoop? It turns out that scientists in Denmark (a small country in Europe) were trying to learn how much iron was in our solar system when it formed, and they stumbled upon some exciting new information. Based on the amount of a special type of iron found in the Sun, which could only have come from the supernova, they discovered that the Sun had already formed when the supernova hit it a million years later. It’s pretty amazing that our Sun wasn’t blown apart when the supernova hit, but it wasn’t. Pretty cool!

Of course, this means that scientists are back to square one. How did the Sun form? We may not know for many years. Right now scientist are more interested in how changes in the Sun affect life on this planet. Did you now that the Sun is constantly releasing solar radiation that bombards the Earth? Or that this radiation is responsible for one of the most spectacular light shows on Earth? In the far northern or southern parts of the world, colourful sweeping curtains of light can be seen dancing against the night sky. These are known as aurora borealis, the northern lights (or aurora australis, the southern lights). They occur when electrically charged particles from the Sun are pulled though the strongest part of the Earth’s magnetosphere (a magnetic shield that surrounds the Earth) toward the Earth’s surface. They enter the atmosphere in these regions, at the North and South poles. Once in the atmosphere, they collide with molecules of air and start to vibrate, giving off the light we see. The Sun can also produce radiation storms where intense solar flares shoot away from the Sun. In July of 2000, a very intense solar flare occurred, exposing air traveller to low amounts of radiation…sort of like having a x-ray at 10 000 feet! Imagine what kind of damage such a flare could do to life on Earth if we didn’t have a magnetosphere!!