Remember when I mentioned that last week the Sun totally barfed at 2.2 million miles per hour? Well, that solar storm produced gorgeous aurora borealis.

Boing Boing:

Following up on a previous Boing Boing post: last week, our sun’s hot plasma shot a billion tons of energetic particles towards Earth, which led to some amazing aurora borealis. I was thrilled to see a fine batch of northern lights photos on Flickr, and even more excited that their creators gave us permission to run them on National Geographic News. And–there could be more coming tonight, thanks to a Saturday solar flare! Enjoy!

The pictures are quite amazing sexy-time space porn. Hit the jump to check the lot of them out.

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You guys want to talk about impressive projectile vomiting? Yeah? Take that shit up with the Sun, our maker, who is doing it as far more impressive speeds than anyone else.

io9:

After nearly a decade of quiet, the Sun is waking up in a big way, and this picture from August 1 shows the most dramatic eruption yet, including a solar flare, a “solar tsunami,” shifting magnetism, shaken corona, and more.

The eruption sent several billion tons of charged particles hurtling towards Earth at 2.2 million miles per hour, or about 1,000 kilometers per second. Fortunately, the effects of the eruption are harmless, even positive, as the eruption’s interaction with Earth’s magnetic field created amazing aurora displays over the northern regions of North America and Europe. This particular solar flare falls in the moderate C-class category. Still, it is possible more severe solar flares will follow, which could disrupt our tech infrastructure both in space (such as satellites) and back here on Earth.

How ridiculous is that? The Sun has a nasty stomach ache, and god damn its letting our solar system know.

Supernova isn’t just the awesomest spell that Sephiroth casts, ya’ll. It’s also a pretty amazing cosmic occurrence . And here it is, in 3D! Behold.

Check out this artist’s impression of an super-violent supernova. The Very Large Telescope managed to obtain the first 3-D view of material after a star’s explosion, traveling 100 million kilometers per hour.

io9

There’s some cosmic porn for you on a Friday. You’re welcome and merry Christmas.

Terraforming ain’t real. Not yet, anyways. Still, that didn’t stop the chaps over at Gizmodo from creating a gorgeous time-lapse video of The Red Planet turning into Our Sister Blue Planet. It’s pure nerd bliss, seeing several familiar fantasies of ours coming to fruition: the aforementioned terraforming, outer-space colonization, and living on Mars.

Hit the jump for the gorgeous video.

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Now listen. There’s all this theoretical bullshit thrown around all the time, and so I must insist that I take it all with a grain of salt. However, since it’s all so crazy and it titillates my Nerd Glands, I also get excited by it. Is it true? Probably Not? More importantly, who cares! It’s fun to contemplate.

New Scientist:

In an analysis of the motion of particles entering a black hole, published in March, Nikodem Poplawski of Indiana University in Bloomington showed that inside each black hole there could exist another universe (Physics Letters B, DOI: 10.1016/j.physletb.2010.03.029). “Maybe the huge black holes at the centre of the Milky Way and other galaxies are bridges to different universes,” Poplawski says. If that is correct – and it’s a big “if” – there is nothing to rule out our universe itself being inside a black hole.

So yeah, it sounds like a lot of Sci-Fi wanking, but I dig it. If you want to get into the mind-bending math behind it, check out the entire article.

[click to enlarge]

Our brains aren’t built to comprehend this shit, but let’s try. You can fit one million Earths inside the sun. And yet? A recently discovered star is 300 times more massive than the sun.

via io9:

Astronomers have identified the most massive stars known. These objects are millions of times brighter than our Sun and the largest of them all is a whoppin’ 300 times the mass of our favorite star.

The stars were discovered in two clusters–NGC 3603 and RMC 136a–and researchers used a “combination of instruments on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, in addition to archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope, to study the stellar nurseries.” With this combination of tools, they were able to discover some almost scary details about R136a1, the most massive of the stars:

Its current mass is approximately 265 solar masses, and its estimated birth weight was as much as 320 times that of our sun. R136a1 also has the highest luminosity of any star found to date — nearly 10 million times greater than the sun.

Good lord. I can’t even begin to imagine that shit. This thing needs a way cooler name than R136a1, though.

[click to enlarge]

I’m amazed we can see this deep into space, let alone explain the gorgeous sight:

via io9:

1,500 light-years away from Earth and around the Orion Nebula, the Herbig-Haro 34 young object is in its protostar stage. Herbig-Haro 34 is ejecting two large jets that propel a massive miasma of dense gas toward its cosmic neighbors. As for the massive cosmic waterfall in the lefthand corner of this three-color composite, it’s gorgeous, but it’s also unclear what exactly this formation is.

Oh shit, only 1,500 light years away? Nice!

[nasa goddard flickr via io9]

We don’t often appreciate the fact that we’re on a fairly impressive spaceship 24/7. I mean, it’s sort of a bummer because it’s locked into a fixed orbit (or something, I think we’re slowly losing our grip on it, whatever), and we can’t do cool stuff like jump hyperspace and shit. But the image above proves one thing, Earth is friggin’ sexy.

Click here, or the image above, for the high-res version. It’s going to break every table in your browser and make you orgasm with the beauty of existence.

[via io9 : click to enlarge]

People dig outer space like I do. I’m learning that here at OL. So at the behest of some, and because of the enjoyment of others, I’m dragging this passion into the OL-pit to play with my other boner-inducements: video games, comic books, movies.

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Stars are god damn impressive. Particularly this one, which is burning so brightly it’s warping and eroding everything around it.

via io9:

This is the nebula NGC 2467, located some 13,000 light-years from Earth. First discovered in the nineteenth century, the nebula lies within the constellation Puppis in the southern hemisphere. The image you see up top (click on it to see the ultra high-res version) was assembled from images taken by the Hubble Telescope back in 2004. Three different color filters were used to bring out the full majesty of the nebula.

Still, NGC 2467 isn’t just beautiful – it’s also a working lesson in astrophysics. The new stars shine more brightly than they ever will again, emitting so much radiation that the surrounding clouds of hydrogen gas begin to erode. In particular, the huge, bright star in the upper center of the image is responsible for most of the radiation emanating from the nebula. It’s clearing away massive amounts of the surrounding cloud, and this processes pushes the denser regions of the nebula elsewhere. Although some of the new stars are shining through, many more are still hidden behind the clouds, just waiting to make their first appearance to Earth astronomers.

That’s a spicy intergalactic meat ball right there.

[legend has it that Ernest Hemingway wrote a six-word story to win a bar bet — For sale: baby shoes, never worn. leading to the author’s birthday, I’m going to offer a daily post of my own six-word story. readers are encouraged to respond with their own]

I watched the moon bleed out.

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