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."

Comments

As far South as WHERE?

[PingXao]

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?

Let me see...

[EvilTwinSkippy]

We have been monitoring the sun from satellites for 40 years. We have been observing the sun with telescopes for a little over 400 years. Our collective experience with the Sun might be about 40,000 years.

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!

Re:Wars and revolutions

[56ker]

There is none - people look for patterns where there aren't any. :)

Re:Wars and revolutions

[bj8rn]

But revolutions and wars and things never happen just like that. You can't start a revolution from nothing, despite of what some have said.

Every revolution is preceeded by years of tensions quietly building up. But I don't think it is the sunspots that trigger the real action. You can't usually even really tell when some war or revolution actually begun. I mean, yes, you can say that WWII started on September 1st, 1939, but this is really only just the date when Germany attacked Poland. What about the events before? Or after? Yes, there was a war, but when did it begin? It's just the same with the 'War on Terror': for a lot of people, the date 09/11/2001 is when the 'war' began. But for some others, it's just a part of a process.

Why was it that there were so many things happening in 1968? I don't know. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Maybe it was (or at least seems to be) the result of many things that had happened before. But. For some, the year 1968 WAS just like any other. Nothing really happened, nothing changed because of these riots in Paris and Berlin. Life went on just the same for many people.

I don't put much value in the "evidence" presented on that webpage you linked. The choice of significant events is much too subjective to prove anything. Just like that other guy (whose post -- the grandparent of this one -- I regrettedly modded up; not the best way to waste a mod point) said, anything can look significant. It all depends on how you present things. Referring again to the linked webpage: the author consideres significant the increase in FBI's power after the Oklahoma city bombing, but the bombing itself was not mentioned separately, therefore not significant and not a sign of trouble (whereas FBI getting more power was considered to be a sign of stability by the author).

Sunspots (and other natural things) may have an effect on what we do, but what we do to ourselves we still do by ourselves. Or are we just robots who are triggered by Sun activity?