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Second Pole To The Right, Straight On 'til Morning

Posted by timothy on from the asbestos-shoes dept.

billn writes "NASA article about the Sun's south pole going walkabout. Some nice imagery from SOHO, as well as some neat animations about the heliospheric sheet."

14 comments

  1. FP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Suck this, bitchaz!

  2. YOU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    I hereby nominate YOU, for the worst slashdot Star Trek allusion ever.

    1. Re:YOU by aderusha · · Score: 2, Informative

      huh? you mean "second star to the right, straight on till morning"? that's from peter pan dude...

    2. Re:YOU by billn · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      Yeah, yer a tard. As the person who replied to this first, it IS a Peter Pan reference. Log off and go read a book. The Internet will be trolled without you.

      --
      - billn
    3. Re:YOU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      The quote is originally from Peter Pan, of course. Do you think there is any chance that that's where the /. editor got it from? I mean any? Like, million to one against? Billion to one? Worse odds than that?

    4. Re:YOU by billn · · Score: 1

      Actually, I submitted it with that title. =P

      --
      - billn
    5. Re:YOU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      Okay, a non-editor could have been referring to Peter Pan...Still the fact that you read slashdot and submit articles means that you aren't off the hook entirely.

  3. Damn you Joachim! by shadowbearer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I was in the middle of making up a story submission for this one. Argh!

    This is actually quite interesting. It means that the internal dynamo within our parent star is not understood quite as well as we thought.

    I wonder, when we've studied this more, what we'll learn about high intensity magnetic fields, and how it will contribute to fusion research.

    Let's hope a lot :-)

    SB

    --
    It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
    1. Re:Damn you Joachim! by billn · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I find it interesting, especially from a 'weather' context. I've always been a big fan of the more elegant science fiction constructs: sail ships. Different writers have posed different concepts, from using a physical sail to harness the outbound particle wave (Star Trek tipped their hat to this in a couple of DS9 episodes), or the more practical/possible use of shaped fields to interact with the magnetic field (see Michael Flynn's 'Rogue Star/Fire Star/Lode Star' series, a highly recommended read. For what he didn't get about the internet, he made up for with his grasp of astrophysics.)

      There's other possibilities that would stem from this kind of research as well. There was a piece in PopSci a few years back about dangling a wire from low orbiting satellite, to trail through Earth's EM field as a means of generating power. Similiar methods could be used to power extraorbital structures by tapping the solar magnetosphere, or even induce drag for low-g propulsion.

      --
      - billn
    2. Re:Damn you Joachim! by barakn · · Score: 2, Informative
      the internal dynamo within our parent star is not understood quite as well as we thought

      Huh? Actually scientists have always considered stellar and planetary dynamos to be very enigmatic. No one has ever claimed they knew them "well." The story isn't about the dynamo, it's about how the heliosphere's shape changes in response to magnetic fields on the surface. As for the double north pole, the article states "it's a fairly normal side-effect of the solar cycle."

      --
      "I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
    3. Re:Damn you Joachim! by shadowbearer · · Score: 1


      I'd bet we see this pop up in a SF book a few years from now. Way too many possibilities.

      A power tap was an idea I had too.

      SB

      --
      It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
    4. Re:Damn you Joachim! by shadowbearer · · Score: 1

      "Actually scientists have always considered stellar and planetary dynamos to be very enigmatic"

      True. But there have been a lot of discoveries like this in the last decade or so that make "current" (OMG, pun) models obsolete. That's why the computer models (our second best test of the many theories) are evolving so fast.

      "The story isn't about the dynamo, it's about how the heliosphere's shape changes in response to magnetic fields on the surface. As for the double north pole, the article states "it's a fairly normal side-effect of the solar cycle."

      Don't be so pedantic, I think we are talking about the same thing - the EM mechanism of Sol. My point was that there is still a lot to be understood about how stars work, no matter how much we think we understand. So we're basically agreed, neh?

      Y'know, some of us do try to present concepts in ways that most people will understand. I was trying to be as simple as possible. Pardon me if I wasn't entirely accurate.

      SB

      --
      It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
    5. Re:Damn you Joachim! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That wire experiment was actually done by NASA - Interestingly, the wire vaporised, (probably) got far morepower than they expected.

  4. *BSD is dying by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic
    It is official; Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is dying

    One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

    You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

    FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.

    Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

    OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

    Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

    All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

    Fact: *BSD is dying