A report by:

FCapt. D.L. Wey

Research conducted into the cycles of class G2V stars[of which Sol is a member], has long determined that their output of energy waxed and waned according to a set period of time[or cycle]. Earth’s sun has a cycle of eleven years.

It is measured by way of the solar constant[a misnomer, as it truly isn’t]which can vary with accordance to the suns' output[which fluctuates some .04 - .07 percent.

It is this cycle which has reached a new phase, one in which the violent solar flares will be at their lowest in more than four hundred years. Such waxes and wanes of a star are influenced by the forces of quantum chromodynamics, as well as

The increase - decrease in solar activity will also affect climatic changes, as well as communications, navigation, etc. Violent geomagnetic storms have been attributed with the knocking out of power, the rising of sea levels. Of course, the reverse is also true, and the ‘Little Ice-Age’ of the 1600’s was believed to have been caused by a century long period of decrease solar activity.

Of course, only time will tell if there is a decrease in solar activity, what it will mean to the world as a whole.

Science in the past had always insisted that stellar bodies would only be found within the boundaries of a body such as our Milky Way galaxy. It was unthinkable to consider that such could be found elsewhere.

Research involving the Hubble space telescope has changed such thinking forever; Observing an area of the sky in the Virgo cluster, a large number of stellar bodies were found that either wandered away, or were torn away from their places of origin.

It has been theorized that such were the result of collisions or close encounters with other galaxies; the resulting gravity waves tearing them from orbit.

Now drifting in intergalactic space, some sixty million light years distant, were counted some six hundred ‘Red Giants’, more than three hundred thousand light years from the nearest large galaxy.

Though the prediction of such phenomenon had been ongoing for a period of thirty years, the technology was not available until the end of the twentieth century to actually confirm such.

New equipment scheduled to be added to the Hubble will make such observations easier, and perhaps, find other stellar bodies wandering the emptiness of intergalactic space.