The ALMA radio antennas bathed in red light in this image. In the background there is the southern Milky Way on the left and the Magellanic Clouds at the top. CREDIT: ESO/C. Malin

The world’s most powerful radio telescope will pull back the curtain on the dusty veil obscuring planet birth, according to its backers.

For the past two years, scientists have been adding antennas — and resolution — to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, which is officially inaugurated next week.

The array isn’t fully open for business yet, but already it is producing groundbreaking science in alien worlds. Last year, it unveiled protoplanetary dust circling a brown dwarf or “failed” star. ALMA also measured planets orbiting the star Fomalhaut and found they were smaller than previously thought.

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Space weather radio, Is a listener supported Live Radar Audio Feed. You might be wondering how do they do it? Well they say its easy, you can see the full details HERE

The Air Force Space Surveillance Radar transmits a 216.98 MHz signal into space continually day and night. A radio engineer and long-time spaceweather.com associate listens in on it. When a meteor or satellite passes over the facility he picks up an echo. So if you have any interest in Radio Astronomy then go take a listen.

 Decaying sunspot AR1667 erupted on Feb. 6th, producing a double-peaked C9-class solar flare that lasted more than ten hours from beginning to end. The slow explosion hurled a twisting, inky-dark plume of plasma into space. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the spiral:

The darkness of the material is a sign that the plasma was dense and cool relative to the surrounding atmosphere of the sun. This isn’t the first time that the sun has produced a dark explosion. Since the launch of Solar Dynamics Observatory in 2010, researchers have catalogued many instances of cool plasma emerging from flare sites. “Cool” has a special meaning, however, on the sun. The temperature of the dark blobs is “only” about 20,000 K vs. 40,000 K to 1,000,000 K for the gas in the surrounding atmosphere.

Decaying sunspot AR1667 probably won’t erupt again. NOAA forecasters put the odds of a significant (M-class or stronger) flare today at 10% or less.

Source:SpaceWeather.com