I guess Michio Kaku was right that initially, they got it wrong. I remember him saying that the next few years would be a low solar flare cycle. Then he said, we got it wrong, it will be a very active solar cycle, possibly some large CMEs.
(AOL April 22) -- Your mother may have told you to never stare at the sun. But you won't be able to look away from the first set of stunning images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.
The pictures taken by the 3-ton satellite, which was thrown into the Earth's orbit three months ago, show our nearest star up close and in ultra-fine detail. Arcs of superheated plasma are captured as they erupt from the sun's surface and soar tens of thousands of miles into space. Waves of charged gas are seen rippling out across the star's surface, traveling at 500,000 miles an hour. And ultraviolet cameras capture the swirls and turbulence at the heart of the raging inferno.
While other high-definition satellites have snapped small segments of the sun's surface before, the SDO can observe the entirety of the solar disc. As well as seeing the big picture, it can also zoom in and pick out features as small as 220 miles across. (Pretty impressive, when you realize that the sun is some 90 million miles away.)
"These initial images show a dynamic sun that I had never seen in more than 40 years of solar research," said Richard Fisher, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA.