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The Sunspot Cycle Explained
An anonymous reader writes "After the recent spate of auroras visible as far south as Florida and Greece, and radio amateurs having lots of fun bouncing their signals off the auroral curtain, maybe some explanation was needed. It has been known for a while that the peak of solar activity trail trails the sunspot cycle peak by a couple of years, but this BBC article appears to explain why. As you may expect most of the data came from the SOHO satellite and the theory has been put together by some scientists using what appears to be data mining."
Very informative. It explained a lot so now There's even more useless trivia I kinow that may one day be useful.
We tend to become like the worst in those we oppose. --Bene Gesserit Coda--
radio amateurs having lots of fun bouncing their signals off the auroral curtain
Could this mean, that when I'm watching a re-run of my favorit tv-shop, it is actually a re-re-run??
As easy as one, two, three.
First e-bombing, now data-mining. They're really putting the Slash back into Slashdot!
Now if only someone could explain the relationship between the sunspot cycle and wars and revolutions in the history of mankind, that would be cool...
I saw it on wendesday. It wasnt very impressive. Just looked like two glowing clouds. A bit disappointing, really :/
With all those recent CMEs I've been scanning the skies at night for a couple of weeks now. At least the clear nights. I'm in the Northeast U.S. and I sure as hell didn't see any auroras. That was one of the things I was specifically looking for. I think the mention of visible auroras as far south as Florida is hogwash. Is that just something the OP made up for effect or did it actually somehow get that far south unnoticed by just about everyone in the Northeast?
if only to the power and comms companies. Always useful to know more about what affects you.
I'm not sure there's much they can *do* about solar flares though, I mean, talk about force of nature! Volumes of incandescent plasma the size of the planet being ejected are always going to be tough to deal with!
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
I did not know that Alaska was just north of Washington.
And we think we really understand this object that has been generating energy for 4 billion years through a process we are only now developing theories about. Lets have some humility humanity!
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
This very radiant natural lightshow is mostly enjoyed by people living far north where there is no streetlights obscuring the show.
//Pingo
However in recent weeks there has been very strong aurora far south and if you would like to know when it's time for a great show, check this NASA webpage http://sec.noaa.gov/rt_plots/satenv.html
The last plot with the 'Estimated Kp' is what to look for. When the number is around 9, then there is great Aurora to be seen if the sky is clear and no streetlights around.
If you live far north, then you might see Aurora with lesser values of this Kp index. Red bars in the plot is needed however.
--- Linux or FreeBSD, it's like blondes or brunettes. I like both. ---
It has nothing to do with sunspots, really. Those student riots and wars are somehow triggered by the Illuminati and the Gnomes of Zurich having their global conventions on the exact same day, which only occurs every 21 years.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Always remember, correlation =! causality.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
"Hey Ogg, look! That big red thing is back again!"
If you're searching for the motive force behind wars, I think you're looking at too long a period of fluctuation in the 11-year sunspot cycle, because the relevant periodicity is a 24-hour one.
:-)
The sun goes down, people engage in a spot of fun hanky panky, a politician is born, and you have wars. Pretty simple, very accurate, and as predictable as night follows day, which indeed it does.
QED
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
They're stll using a SOHO satellite? They could have learned a lot more if they had upgraded to a larger enterprise class solution. Hmm, enterprise .. catchy!
Those who live and work in the high latitudes - such as in those few sources the US has where there is oil pay a lot of attention to sunspots. Communication disruptions are the biggest problem. Much more rare are power failures - but they have been known to bring down entire power grids. In 1986, British Columbia had a huge power failure. Not all the evidence is in about the recent East coast power outage - They still haven't determined what caused the lines to overheat in the first place - The Ohio company appears to have made mistakes - but they may also just have been trying to keep up with too much demand on the grid all day. Solar flares affect the grid in unexpected ways. That's one of the many reasons they're being watched so closely.
I've probably seen the aurora 300-400 times. It is one of the beautiful things to my eye in nature. If it's out, in my experience - it can change in 5 minutes time from close to nothing to wild. Photos don't do it justice - but this site has some movies too, that give just a slight feel of it.
The BBC article is very simplified - A fairly new technique - called "helioseismic holography" allows astronomers to actually 'look through' the sun to image the magnetic fields of very large sunspots like the present pair (they occur in pairs - corresponding to a north and south magetic pole).
This present sunspot pair is the largest we've ever measured.
The particles themselves don't really emit the light - "the electrons that cause auroras do not come directly from the Sun"
Sunspots can be seen under certain lighting conditions when the sun is rising or setting even with the naked eye.
Chinese astonomers recorded them long before they were one of the first things that we're recorded by the inventors and early users of the telescope.
Sunspots - a reduced number of them - have been correlated with cooler weather trends.
There was about a 70 year period of fairly recent time - 1645 -1715 that apparently saw no auroras - even at high latitudes - kids thought they were mythical stories by the time they appeared.
The solar flare a few weeks ago was the strongest we've ever measured, and we can expect to see more as that same pair of sunspots rotates around to face Earth.
The solar eclipse will be tomorrow - there will be some great photos that will come out in the next few days.
How comes that one never seems to have modpoints when one needs them ;)
It does not orbit Earth.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Americans think they're tough, but in reality are giant pussies. Look at the giant military these people have. And what are they doing with it? Fighting in little pussy wars against half-dead 3rd world countries, then pat themselves on the shoulder because they're so great and stuff.
I didn't actually read the article, just looked at the pretty pictures and guessed it had something to do with suns and stuff. Or maybe with 20th century impressionism.
Brazil's independence was not in that range, it was in 1822.
But then again we hardly see any auroras. Well, maybe in the far, far south...
An anonymous reader writes
Is he allowed to do that?
THIS is a Satellite.
I'm not solar physicist, but it seems like the article is attributing intention to the sun, as if it "wants" to "shed its magnetic skin", like it was a purposeful way of "dealing" with the increasing tension.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
but that hasn't stopped some people from claiming that we have managed to cause "global warming". We aren't accurate 30 days out, nor a quarter, yet we are expect to believe we can be accurate 50 to 100 years? We cannot seem to predict the ozone hole! (which isn't there right now...)
One volcanoe, a bunch of wildfires, or a hurricane does things to the environment we can lay little claim in judging to their fullest extent yet we claim to know our effect?
As you put it, we don't know jack about that giant shiny object in the sky, let alone all its effects on our planet.
Man is anything but humble, let alone when some of those men have an ajenda to push. Environmentalist or Corporate love humility, for the other guy.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
They stole the land, that's why they get attacked. History didn't start yesterday you know.
Another cool sun photo, of the suns corona. The short paragraph also discusses the total solar eclipse tomorrow, sorry for most of us it is southern hemisphere only.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
Now that we have this theory relating the sun's surface/coronal activity to the reversing of its magnetic field with a given periodicity, what say we look for a possible analog with the earth. Might there be a relation between surface/atmospheric events on the earth and the reversing of it's magnetic poles (eg. volcanic activity increase, polar ozone hole size increase timing relative to a pole reversal event?) Any armchair scientist care to correlate the solar pole reversal with the longer period of the earth's pole reversals?
were visible with the naked eye a few weeks back when we had the fires here in southern california, the smoke was so thick, you could still see the sun, but not in its right glory, you could see the big sunspots as shown here: http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/sunspots/
it was interesting to say the least..
Actually that's pretty funny. For the movie illiterate, it's a reference to Flash Gordan and the destruction of the earth via. manipulated natural events.
Actually, I'm not a 'sir'.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
"They stole the land, that's why they get attacked. History didn't start yesterday you know."
They did not steal it. That is another neo-nazi lie. Besides, the anti-semitism and attacks by Muslims predates the modern state of Israel.
Yes, history did not start yesterday, but your knowledge of apparently does. Stop reading Mein Kampf.
So with this new understanding of regular ejections of billions of tons of matter from the sun, does anyone know if scientists are changing their minds about how long the sun will still last?
The reason I ask is because apparently gravity created by the mass of the sun is roughly equivalent to the outward expansive force caused by the fusion reaction going on inside. If the mass is decreasing more rapidly because of these regular shedding events, I'd expect the ETA of our sun going red-giant and consuming the inner planets would be sooner than originally thought.
I've heard that they say "skips rolling" when this type of weather is happening. Can anybody confirm this?
On a few nights, you could hear them making a crackling sound, keeping time with the visuals. It was one of the most eerie things I've experienced.
Anyone else heard the aurora?
That was a gender and genus-neutral 'sir' :-) In case you are, perhaps, a cat.