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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."
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.
Easy, just write down all the wars and revolutions that don't coincide with the sunspots. :)
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?
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. ---
There is none - people look for patterns where there aren't any. :)
Video Game cheats, hints a
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.
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.
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?
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
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..
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.
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.