Yesterday, while most of us were busy going about our day, everyone's favourite flaming ball of plasma decided to give NASA's cameras a little show. More specifically, the Solar Dynamics Observatory managed to capture our Sun's biggest solar flare of the year thus far. Read More >>

This is actually a pretty great thought experiment. At first it might seem kind of pointless to talk about what would happen if the sun vanished, but it doesn't actually result in the immediate destruction of everything. Which is weird. Vsauce walks through a pretty nuanced description of how earth's natural systems would slowly fail, but over weeks and even years, not seconds. The cold would get us in the end, but extremophiles that live in deep sea volcanoes and thermal vents could survive for billions of years. If you're not heliocentric and human-centric things don't look so bleak. [Vsauce] Read More >>

You probably think the sky is blue because of the ocean and air and reflections or something like that. But how does it turn red sometimes? Or orange? Or rather, why does the sky have to be any colour at all? PBS explains it so you can explain it to your future kid. Read More >>

You know as a kid when you used to use a magnifying glass and the Sun to burn ants? This is basically that, but more awesome (and less gruesome!). Using the screen of an old big screen TV, Grant Thompson was able to create a 1.2m magnifying lens that could melt a stack of pennies, burst a glass bottle, cook food, burn pretty much anything, and more. Your childhood self would be so amazed at the power of the Sun. Hell, your adult self is pretty amazed too. [Grant Thompson via The Awesomer] Read More >>

Images like this might not look like anything new, but they're usually acquired by the likes of NASA. These pictures, however, were taken by a dude in his humble back garden. Read More >>

This beautiful, unreal portrait of the Sun was taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory as it was moving into its eclipse season: Read More >>

Sometimes science can turn the Universe into art, like this video from NASA, made using a gradient filter. From NASA: Read More >>

Holy sci-fi awesome space balls. European astronomers have discovered an alien planet in Alpha Centauri, the star system that's pretty much our neighbour. The planet, which is Earth-sized, is only 4.3 light years away. Read More >>

Water on the moon is nothing particularly revelatory. But a new study suggests that H20 on the surface of the Earth's nearest neighbor comes from a most unlikely place: the Sun. Read More >>

Everybody knows about absolute zero, but what about the other end of the spectrum, absolute infinity, as it begs to be called? As you might be able to guess, there's a lot more room to go hotter than there is to go colder, but there still has to be some sort of limit, right? Read More >>

Holy Jesuspants. The image was already astonishing but this video made my head spin. Watching this magnificent violence from every angle is a good way to realise just how lucky we are to be alive, precisely because of that gigantic ball of fire in the sky. Read More >>

I don't know if it's the most amazing view of a solar eruption ever recorded, but it probably is. When our friends at NASA Goddard sent us this image of the latest solar eruption today, we just couldn't believe how astonishing and ominous it looked. Read More >>

A Swedish company called Intellego Technologies is set to commercialise a special wristband, much like the kind wrapped around your wrist at concerts and music festivals, that can alert its wearer when it's time to get out of the sun so as to avoid burning or potentially carcinogenic sun damage. Read More >>

Snow blindness, arc eye, welder's flash, bake eyes—these all describe the common effects of staring at an intensely bright light source. But what actually happens to your eyes when you try to hold a staring contest with our closest star? It's not pleasant, that's for sure. Read More >>

Sunburn is painful, dangerous and embarrassing. But despite knowing it's the body's protective immune response to high levels of ultraviolet radiation, scientists weren't exactly sure what the biological process behind it was. Turns out that it's your RNA screaming out in pain — a finding which could help sunburn and other skin ailments for good. Read More >>