Related papers: Le Soleil se l\`evera-t-il demain ?

The development of science and technology has progressively demonstrated the ability of humankind to understand and manipulate the physical world, and it has also shown some fundamental limitations to predictability of physical events. This…

Numerous Earth-destroying doomsday scenarios have recently been analyzed, including breakdown of a metastable vacuum state and planetary destruction triggered by a "strangelet'' or microscopic black hole. We point out that many previous…

Life emerged on the Earth within the first quintile of its habitable window, but a technological civilization did not blossom until its last. Efforts to infer the rate of abiogenesis, based on its early emergence, are frustrated by the…

We investigate the statistical properties of the extreme events of the solar cycle as measured by the sunspot number. The recent advances in the methodology of the theory of extreme values is applied to the maximal extremes of the time…

Do We Inhabit The Best O All Possible Worlds? German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz thought so, writing in 1710 that our planet, warts and all, must be the most optimal one imaginable. Leibniz's idea was roundly scorned as unscientific…

Sunspot engravings and measurements in 1660-1676 are analyzed to retrieve sunspot area and heliocoordinates. Based on these data, we revise the Hoyt and Schatten (The role of the sun in climate change, 1997) hypothesis of long-lived…

The solar magnetic field, thought to be generated by the motion of plasma within the Sun, alternates on the order of 11-year cycles and is incompletely understood. Industries rely on accurate forecasts of solar activity, but can solar…

Unlike most other laws of nature, the second law of thermodynamics is of a statistical nature, according to Boltzmann, meaning that its reliability arises from the vast number of particles present in macroscopic systems. This means that…

In 2023, 639,300 people died in France, 35,900 fewer than in 2022, a year of high mortality. Over the last twenty years, from 2004 to 2023, January 3rd was the deadliest day, while August 15th was the least deadly one. Elderly people die…

The new solar composition, when applied to compute a model of the Sun, leads to serious disagreement between the predictions of the model and the observations obtained by helioseismology. New measurements of the coronal Ne/O abundance ratio…

If the human race comes to an end relatively shortly, then we have been born at a fairly typical time in history of humanity. On the other hand, if humanity lasts for much longer and trillions of people eventually exist, then we have been…

Recently published, precise stellar photometry of 72 Sun-like stars obtained at the Fairborn Observatory between 1993 and 2017 is used to set limits on the solar forcing of Earth's atmosphere of $\pm$ 4.5 W m$^{-2}$ since 1750. This…

The Sun continuously expels a fraction of its own mass in the form of a steadily accelerating outflow of ionized gas called the "solar wind." The solar wind is the extension of the Sun's hot (million-degree Kelvin) outer atmosphere that is…

Recent observations of solar type stars with the Kepler satellite by Maehara et al. have revealed the existence of superflares (with energy of 10^33 - 10^35 erg) on Sun-like stars, which are similar to our Sun in their surface temperature…

Given a sufficiently large universe, numerous civilizations almost surely exist. Some of these civilizations will be short-lived and die out relatively early in their development, i.e., before having the chance to spread to other planets.…

Is life most likely to emerge at the present cosmic time near a star like the Sun? We consider the habitability of the Universe throughout cosmic history, and conservatively restrict our attention to the context of "life as we know it" and…

The extension of the sunspot number series backward in time is of considerable interest for dynamo theory, solar, stellar, and climate research. We have used records of the Be-10 concentration in polar ice to reconstruct the average sunspot…

Random sampling in high dimensions has successfully been applied to phenomena as diverse as nuclear resonances, neural networks and black hole evaporation. Here we revisit an elegant argument by the British physicist Dennis Sciama, which…

We show that solar neutrino experiments set an upper limit of 7.8% (7.3% including the recent KamLAND measurements) to the fraction of energy that the Sun produces via the CNO fusion cycle, which is an order of magnitude improvement upon…

Using kappa Ceti as a proxy for the young Sun we show that not only was the young Sun much more effective in protecting the Earth environment from galactic cosmic rays than the present day Sun; it also had flare and corona mass ejection…