The May 2024 solar storm, also known as the Gannon storm or Mother’s Day solar storm, is now ranked by NOAA as one of the most memorable solar events in history, and potentially the most powerful documented this century. It included a parade of powerful solar flares between May 8–11, 2024, originating from a beastly sunspot group that measured 17 times wider than Earth’s diameter. According to NOAA, during this time frame, there were at least eight coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which are giant blasts made up of magnetic field and plasma, that targeted Earth. This resulted in the creation of extreme geomagnetic storm (G5) conditions, the highest on NOAA’s space weather scale.

“The Gannon storm was a spectacular event in the sense that so many people got to see the aurora, especially those living in areas that don’t typically see it,” Mike Cook, Space Weather Lead at MITRE Corporation, told Space.com. “But, beyond that, it was a reminder that our sun is capable of producing these very disruptive events that can impact our critical infrastructure.”

A high-resolution imaging system captures distant objects by shining laser light on them and detecting the reflected light.

One of astronomers’ tricks for observing distant objects is intensity interferometry, which involves comparing the intensity fluctuations recorded at two separate telescopes. Researchers have now applied this technique to the imaging of remote objects on Earth [1]. They developed a system that uses multiple laser beams to illuminate a distant target and uses a pair of small telescopes to collect the reflected light. The team demonstrated that this intensity interferometer can image millimeter-wide letters at a distance of 1.36 km, a 14-fold improvement in spatial resolution compared with a single telescope.

Interferometry is common in radio astronomy, where the signal amplitudes from a large array of radio telescopes are summed together in a way that depends on the relative phases of the radio waves. Intensity interferometry is something else. It doesn’t involve addition of amplitudes or preservation of phases. Instead, light is recorded from a single source at two separate detectors (or telescopes), and the fluctuations in the intensities of the two signals are compared. Spatial information on the source comes from analyzing how these fluctuations are correlated in time and how this correlation depends on the detector separation.

Captured by the VST, NGC 3640 reveals a turbulent history of cosmic cannibalism, but its current companion, NGC 3641, remains surprisingly untouched.

The James Webb Space Telescope has just uncovered something extraordinary at the very core of our galaxy.

What if every point of light in the sky was a galaxy? NASA’s latest image uncovers a cosmic secret that will leave you speechless