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The Sunspot Cycle Explained

Posted by michael on from the blister-on-the-sun dept.

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."

5 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Wars and revolutions by Trurl's+Machine · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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...

    1. Re:Wars and revolutions by Trurl's+Machine · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I don't think it's that simple. If you read history, you notice striking years of world-wide turmoil like 1848, 1863, 1905, 1968 or 1989. Take the 1968, the most obvious one. Why did the students of Beijing, Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, Paris, Mexico City and Berkeley take it to the streets the same year? They didn't even fight for similar cases! Don't tell me that every year was like 1968, because it just wasn't.

    2. Re:Wars and revolutions by SmackCrackandPot · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Here's a theory... Some evidence suggests that there's a link between global climate (ocean temperatures) and solar sunspot activity. This is known to affect floods and thus crop production. If you've got a population busy harvesting crops, then they're less likely to be motivated to start wars. Unemployment and poverty have been the major factors involved in starting wars.

  2. Sun:Earth correlation? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting


    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?

  3. Accelerated Solar Aging? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.