Sunrise Solstice at Stonehenge

This picture was taken during the week of the 2008 summer solstice at Stonehenge in United Kingdom, and captures a picturesque sunrise involving fog, trees, clouds, stones placed about 4,500 years ago, and a 5 billion year old large glowing orb. Even given the precession of the Earth's rotational axis over the millennia, the Sun continues to rise over Stonehenge in an astronomically significant way.

Image Credit & Copyright: Max Alexander, STFC, SPL
Explanation from: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100621.html

NASA's SDO Observes Fast-Growing Sunspot

As magnetic fields on the sun rearrange and realign, dark spots known as sunspots can appear on its surface. Over the course of Feb. 19-20, 2013, scientists watched a giant sunspot form in under 48 hours. It has grown to over six Earth diameters across but its full extent is hard to judge since the spot lies on a sphere not a flat disk.

The spot quickly evolved into what's called a delta region, in which the lighter areas around the sunspot, the penumbra, exhibit magnetic fields that point in the opposite direction of those fields in the center, dark area. This is a fairly unstable configuration that scientists know can lead to eruptions of radiation on the sun called solar flares.

Image Credit: NASA/SDO/AIA/HMI/Goddard Space Flight Center
Explanation from: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sdo/news/fastgrowing-sunspot.html

NASA's Kepler Mission Discovers Tiny Planet System

NASA's Kepler mission has discovered a new planetary system that is home to the smallest planet yet found around a star like our Sun, approximately 210 light-years away in the constellation Lyra. 

The artist's concept depicts the new planet dubbed Kepler-37b. The planet is slightly larger than our Moon, measuring about one-third the size of Earth. Kepler-37b orbits its host star every 13 days at less than one-third the distance Mercury is to the Sun. The estimated surface temperature of this smoldering planet, at more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit (700 degrees Kelvin), would melt the zinc in a penny. 

Astronomers don't think the tiny planet has an atmosphere or could support life as we know it, but the Moon-size world is almost certainly rocky in composition. 

Image Credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech
Explanation from: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/multimedia/images/tiny-planet-kepler-37b.html