Word: solarity
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...solar system's gas giants, Saturn is made up mostly of hydrogen and helium and has a volume 764 times as great as Earth's. That much gas concentrated in one place ought to be dynamic, and Saturn is. Winds blow at more than 1,100 m.p.h. at the equator-the strongest gusts on any planet in the solar system-and helium rain is thought to fall out of the clouds. Temperatures at the cloud tops are a frigid -218ºF...
...group saw Venus cross the sun’s disk briefly using special solar filter glasses before the sun moved behind the clouds for the remaining duration of the transit...
Many scenarios for global warming, for example, invoke a speedup in the hydrological cycle by which water evaporates and then comes down as rain. The cooling produced by solar dimming, however, may slow the rate of evaporation, while higher up in the atmosphere the pollutants responsible for absorbing and reflecting sunlight are likely to interfere with the process that produces rain...
...worldwide darkening to be about 4% over three decades, while another computes it to be more than twice that much. There are also questions about the reliability of the devices that measure the sunlight reaching Earth's surface. Known as radiometers, these instruments are nothing more than flat, black solar collectors capped with glass. They are sometimes finicky; a smudge of dirt or a speck of dust can cause bogus readings and change the calculated results...
...Solar dimming, in other words, is a problem still in the process of being defined, and as its dimensions become clearer, so will the nature of the challenge the world faces. Although scientists have done a lot of thinking about global warming, they are just beginning to grapple with the problem of how global warming and solar dimming interact. As Ramanathan puts it, "It's like we have a new gorilla sitting down at the table"--and it could turn out to be a very big gorilla indeed. --By J. Madeleine Nash