Saturday, May 9, 2009

Sun Goes Out For a Few Seconds

Sun Goes Out For A Few Seconds

May 7, 2009 | Issue 45•19


TUCSON, AZ—Officials at the Kitt Peak National Observatory are saying that, while the short period of utter darkness and intense cold was distressing, there is "no immediate cause for alarm" over the sun's six-second outage Monday. "We're not sure what caused our sun, which is in essence a self-sustaining fusion reaction, to defy science and just go out for a moment like that, but I wouldn't worry too much," astronomer Stephen Pompea said. "There is a slight chance it could repeat, like sunspot activity, a more common—whup! There it goes again. You seeing this? Kind of weird how it—okay, back on." Observatory personnel said they would give their full attention to investigating the phenomenon as soon as they figure out why last night's moon was blood red and took up half the sky.

For the record, Stephen Pompea is a real person who works in my department...someone at the Onion must know him!

3 comments:

kkdither said...

There are other daily readers of the JTI from your area, hale. Maybe someone was reading your blog while looking at SER's pictures and had a "momentary lapse of reason" and wrote to The Onion?

OrbsCorbs said...

If the sun goes out anymore, we must sacrifice virgins to appease it.

Lizardmom said...

I must have blinked, totally missed it :(