Science Saturday: Solar rotation, global warming, Olympic Esports Games and Voyager 1

China space mission

Chinese scientists have discovered a new pattern of solar atmospheric rotation. It was done through the use of the solar exploration satellite, China's H-alpha Solar Explorer. The team said it had obtained the world's first three-dimensional image of solar atmospheric rotation. They said it reveals that as solar atmospheric altitude increases, the sun's rotational speed also increases. This challenges traditional understanding and has significant implications for solar activity and the sun's evolution.

Global warming

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) warns of an 80 percent chance that global average temperatures will surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels for at least one year between 2024 and 2028. That prediction marks a stark change from 2015, when the WMO considered this scenario nearly impossible. The 1.5-degree Celsius limit is the aspirational target of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement, an international treaty on climate change. Scientists said that exceeding this threshold over the long term will lead to increasingly frequent and catastrophic extreme weather events.

Olympic Esports Games

The first Olympic Esports Games are set to be added soon to the event portfolio of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), as it seeks to attract and retain young audiences. The IOC said it will ask members to approve a proposal to create a video game Olympics when they meet next month in Paris on the eve of the Summer Games. The Olympic Esports Games will build on an IOC-backed week of video game competitions held last year in Singapore. It was a mix of physical simulations of Olympic sports and traditional video games. Around 75 percent of its viewers were between the ages of 13 and 34.

Space exploration

NASA's Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft from Earth, is transmitting science data again. After a computer problem in November, its instruments resumed operations. Meaningful data was received in April. Over 24 billion kilometers away from Earth, Voyager 1 drifts through interstellar space. It's discovered a thin ring around Jupiter and several of Saturn's moons. Its instruments collect information about plasma waves, magnetic fields and particles.