They came from outer space--and you can have one! Genuine meteorites are now on sale in the Space Weather Store. | | | LYRID METEOR SHOWER: Earth is entering a stream of debris from ancient Comet Thatcher, source of the annual Lyrid Meteor Shower. Usually the shower is mild (10-20 meteors per hour) but unmapped filaments of dust in the comet's tail sometimes trigger outbursts ten times stronger. Forecasters expect the peak to occur on April 21-22. [photo gallery] TWO NEW SUNSPOTS: On Friday they didn't exist. On Saturday they are big sunspots. Today, sunspots AR1726 and AR1727 are rapidly emerging in the sun's northern hemisphere. The larger of the two, AR1726, contains nearly a dozen dark cores and spans 125,000 km from end to end. Click to view a 24-hour movie recorded by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory: AR1726 is the fastest-growing and, so far, the most active. It is crackling with C-class flares and seems capable of producing even stronger M-class eruptions. Because of the sunspot's central location on the solar disk, any explosions this weekend will be Earth-directed. Stay tuned. Solar flare alerts: text, voice. CME TARGETS MERCURY: The magnetic canopy of sunspot AR1719 erupted during the late hours of April 18th, hurling a bright CME into space. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory photographed the cloud racing away from the sun's western limb: Earth was not in the line of fire. Instead, the CME is heading for Mercury: ETA April 20th. NASA's MESSENGER probe in orbit around Mercury will be monitoring the effects of the impact. If the CME overwhelms Mercury's relatively weak magnetic field, it could scour material off the planet's surface creating a temporary atmosphere and adding material to Mercury's comet-like tail. Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery Realtime Comet Photo Gallery Realtime Noctilucent Cloud Photo Gallery [previous years: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011] Potentially Hazardous Asteroids ( PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding new ones all the time. On April 20, 2013 there were 1397 potentially hazardous asteroids. Notes: LD means "Lunar Distance." 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distance between Earth and the Moon. 1 LD also equals 0.00256 AU. MAG is the visual magnitude of the asteroid on the date of closest approach. | The official U.S. government space weather bureau | | The first place to look for information about sundogs, pillars, rainbows and related phenomena. | | Researchers call it a "Hubble for the sun." SDO is the most advanced solar observatory ever. | | 3D views of the sun from NASA's Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory | | Realtime and archival images of the Sun from SOHO. | | from the NOAA Space Environment Center | | the underlying science of space weather | |