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Scientists Predict Big Solar Cycle
An anonymous reader pointed us at a post on the Physorg blog, which discusses the possibility of an upcoming period of intense solar weather. We've discussed this before, but increasingly the evidence looks like 'Solar Cycle 24' (due to start in 2010 or so) is going to make life interesting here on earth. From the post: "Hathaway explains: 'When a gust of solar wind hits Earth's magnetic field, the impact causes the magnetic field to shake. If it shakes hard enough, we call it a geomagnetic storm.' In the extreme, these storms cause power outages and make compass needles swing in the wrong direction. Auroras are a beautiful side-effect. Hathaway and Wilson looked at records of geomagnetic activity stretching back almost 150 years and noticed something useful:. 'The amount of geomagnetic activity now tells us what the solar cycle is going to be like 6 to 8 years in the future,' says Hathaway."
Hmm, is that the cycle where we see one day of the Sun's life, and during that day the sun gets shot multiple times, saves the president, arrests the president later, gets beaten mercilessly, heals completely, and saves the girl, all in one day.. Or am I confusing this with something else...?
TLF
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
We are now in the solar minimum and we just got hit by an X6 flare. It should be interesting to see what it looks like when the Sun is at a maximum.
I know many in the amateur astronomy community are gearing up for this cycle, and are saving their pennies for H-alpha filters & telescopes.
Al Gore blames the intense solar storm on global warming.
...if anyone more knowledgable about the subject for me could tell me;
A: What areas of the Earth are likely to be most and least affected
B: How bad are the effects supposed to be
C: What are some examples (links to articles or research) of previous effects that may be widely known (other than the Aurora)
Thanks
Cycles huh? Is this part of why they call it Mother nature?
Maybe this 'armageddon' is not man made but the sun does it, after all the Egyptians called their Sun God RA.
And technically, the sun does provide all energy and gravity for us to live off.
So come 2012 the rapture time, high intense radiation, mutants of all species will be made, super humans maybe with special powers.
Maybe half or most of the population will die and not make it past the 'enhancement' but what ever does make it will
be uber next gen upgraded like in mutantX.
Are any scientists experimenting with fast evolution using radiation/cosmic rays on small animals/flies?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
So, obviously our culture has diseased the innocent solarian people. Now they are causing their own homeland to have solar warming.
When will we learn from Algore??
And it's been scientifically proven by consensus that the above is true. The only ones who doubt it are right-wing, gun-toting religious wackos who want corporations to make money and kill Bambi. Don't fall for their hype.
Buy yours today!
My point is, such forecasts of such still poorly understood phenomena still seem to go wrong much more often than they go right. And then when someone does happen to hit it right all I seem to hear is, "See, we knew all along. Now listen to us always!"
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
So does this mean we can predict solar flares and use them to travel to the past or the future?
Will just go back on Oprah claim its people that are causing it and we need to act now.
Oh, and sell more books.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
But seriously, there's a guy in New Zealand who publishes weather predictions based upon lunar cycles. He has a loyal following, even though 99% of the time he's wrong. On the rare occasion he gets it right (either by chance, or by making the same predictions as genuine meteorologists) his flock proclaim his method to be completely reliable and accurate. Strangely enough, when he's wrong, they either remain silent, or claim he was right by applying highly selective interpretations of his predictions and the actual weather.
Just as 'astrologers' concoct incredibly vague predictions, such as "Something interesting may occur to somebody or something at some time in the future. Or not", and then triumphantly announce success when something does or doesn't happen. Yet far more people trust astrologers than scientists. I guess that explains a whole lot about the completely fucked-up mess that is the human species.
...like the Sun has PMS.
This year was supposed to have several MAJOR hurricanes, worse than ever before, because of "Global Warming".
IIRC, 11 were predicted. Zero appeared.
I suspect this Solar catastrophe prediction will be just as accurate.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Well, I for one think its about time we get our hands on larger dual energy personal vehicules.
That will tech those pesky OPEPs type not to mess with us energy wasting type.
It may look like Slashdot doesn't care about the plight of the Solarians right now, but I swear we'll pledge our support
;)
I for one welcome our new Solarian overlords!
Bet you didn't see THAT one coming, did ya?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Their forecast is based on historical records of geomagnetic storms. Hathaway explains: "When a gust of solar wind hits Earth's magnetic field, the impact causes the magnetic field to shake. If it shakes hard enough, we call it a geomagnetic storm." In the extreme, these storms cause power outages and make compass needles swing in the wrong direction. Auroras are a beautiful side-effect. Hathaway and Wilson looked at records of geomagnetic activity stretching back almost 150 years and noticed something useful:. "The amount of geomagnetic activity now tells us what the solar cycle is going to be like 6 to 8 years in the future," says Hathaway.
Spaceweather.com has linked to a number of predictions over the last year or so regarding the next solar cycle. What is left out is that no evidence has ever been given showing showing that any method has proven to be accurate in the past. I challenge anyone to find such data.
...let me know when the said scientists can predict my girlfriend's cycles.
Looks like 10 meters will be open for DX in a few years. Maybe even
some 'crossing the pond' on 6 meters too!
...gotta start saving for that H-alpha telescope. Believe it or not, for about $500 you can buy a telescope that allows you to view the sun through a filter with a bandwidth of less than .1 nm. This gives you an idea of what you can see with it.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
As an amateur radio operator I welcome our DX Overlords. Actually I plan to be one - DXCC - WAZ - 5BWAS on QRP. HI HI.
Too lazy to create a sig...
The amateur radio community (Yes, we're still here) is waiting with baited traps for the "Peak of '24". Ya see, its only in the cycle peaks when amateur radio becomes too much fun. Times like now, in the valley of solar near-death, we have to fight to maintain any contact with our buddies. Remember when Cb radios would skip from Alaska to Mexico? That was a solar maximum, and a weak one at that. Imagine what you could do with a legal kilowatt of power and a well engineered antenna! I know some of the old timers who are literally praying for a few more years before they go "silent key" in order to reap the harvest of contacts that is predicted. If you wish to experience the true camaraderie of thousands of geek friends and associates, during what may be the most interesting solar cycle yet, start studying for that ham ticket. We've made it even easier than ever before. See ya down the log.
If you're going to make a solar powered bicycle, why not just make it normal sized?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Unless you're in China or Australia or New Zealand. Then it's the one on the right.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Oh, great ... the sun has a big cycle on the way. No doubt it will be bitchy and irritable beforehand. Like we need that.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
A quick google tells me the sun reverses magnetic field every 22 years. 11 is in the middle, guess that is why but not fully. So we shift that question upstream one notch as to the "why?" part. source : http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/sun/activit y/solar_cycle.html
t ml
I also just found out this NASA solar division lost funding
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.sh
6 to 8 years in the future?
It doesn't land on December 21st, 2012 does it?
End of the Maya Calendar
Be careful about PhysOrg.com: The web site carries "press releases", which are advertisements disguised as articles. (In the linked article, brand-name battery makers don't want people to buy the much less expensive but otherwise identical generic batteries, apparently. Also, battery makers want people to think it is normal to spend a lot of money on batteries.)
If Bush had only gotten his environmental policies right, things like this wouldn't be happening. Surely this has to be a human-induced event like global warming, it cannot possibly be a natural phenomenon!
I love my sig.
The hermaphrodite is not the issue here.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
In the fall, I went back to school in western NY state (Alfred University, near the NY/PA border), and on many nights in December, we could see vivid Auroras even over the campus light polution. At the time, I didn't think it was possible for them to be visible at such a lattitude. If the next maximum ends up being as strong as predicted, we might even see them farther south.
AC has an anger problem.
Just to be picky, the comment with the summary says the solar cycle is due to start in 2010 or so. In the first paragraph of the article it says Solar cycle 24, due to peak in 2010 or 2011.
I enjoyed the aurora last week. They were so intense, they were bright even to the south of me. Photos at the link in my signature if you're curious. I've animated them too.
Oh You POS
everyone predicted this would be a quiet season.
yer an idiot.
In 1859 a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) was observed by Richard Carrington
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a British Astronomer. Aurora was observed in Havana and transcontinental telegraph
lines burst into flames...
If one of a similar intensity were to hit us today, it would might
burn out electrical systems hemisphere wide. Our power grids and
transistor based control system could fail.
I would be curious if someone with a statistics background could give
some rough estimate as to the frequency of a CME hitting earth, based upon
the fact that the last such an event (which would severly disrupt our civilization)
happened only 147 years ago.
http://csem.engin.umich.edu/muri/MURIreport2003.p
http://www.agu.org/cgi-bin/SFgate/SFgate?&listenv
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronal_mass_ejectio
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006AdSpR..38..232S
This new together with the fact that the magnetic field of the mother ship Gaya (Earth herself) are getting weaker and progressively reversing its magnetic poles, we will be served with all we wanted: Energy, pure and RAW! Somehow Carl Sagan shared same point of view of the Mayan culture... in the Carl Sagan Cosmos documentary series (and book), he managed to represent the Eras of the universe as a mosaic and we are on the edge of this universal Era! Mayan cultures build the same mosaic but in the form of the pyramids, as each platform of them, were an Era for the universe and the very top are the last Era. Imagining this planet as a living being, surrounded by forces that are calculated with powers of 10, together with the our global ignorance towards nature, we are not in due time get the true revelations! And man said "let there be light" and he was [blessed?] by light, heat, magnetism, gravity and all the energies of the universe. (in Animatrix) Its something bigger than lives! Due to the speed of the light being superior to the speed of the sound, some people seem intelligent until we hear them!
I can't believe no one has mentioned this, but that correlates neatly with the end of the Mayan long count calendar, signalling the end of the fifth age and mankind (according to some sources, also a new beginning of some sort), and the start of the sixth. Heres an excerpt from the article:
The end of the 13th b'ak'tun is conjectured to have been of great significance to the Maya, but does not necessarily mark the end of the world according to their beliefs, but a new beginning or time of re-birth. According to the Popol Vuh, a book compiling details of creation accounts known to the Quiché Maya of the colonial-era highlands, we are living in the fifth world. The Popol Vuh describes the first four creations that the gods failed in making and the creation of the successful fifth world where men were placed. The Maya believed that the fifth world would end in catastrophe and the sixth and final world would be created that would signal the end of mankind.
The last creation ended on a long count of 13.0.0.0.0. Another 13.0.0.0.0 will occur on December 21, 2012, and it has been discussed in many New Age articles and books that this will be the end of this creation, the next pole shift or something else entirely.
I don't know if thats the coolest thing I've ever seen, or the creepiest.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
That was on the QST cover during a previous peak about 40 years ago.
1000 SlashDot sigs
No, its not that funny. At the calculated date, dec 21 2012, the cosmos will have the same constellation as at the end of the previous era, after the large ice age which ended 10.000 bC.
It was the time when the Sfinx was built, before the times of the large rainfalls, 9000-8000 years ago,
Now we don't really know what is the cause of galactic sorms, do we?
The laughed-at Mayan calendar is in fact more accurate than ours. Why laugh? Ignorance?
The end of the Mayan calendar is not the end of the world, it's the end of * this * world. Previous worlds have existed, ended by disasters such as Noah's flood. Us humans are only 150.000 years on this planet and we;ve gone through several ice-ages.
In our case, our solar system will line up with "Hunab-Ku", the center of the Universe, as they refer to it. See it as an electromagnetic axis. The planet will cross the N-S border by 2012.
If the polar axis flips, this may cause vulcanoes to erupt, clouds to darken the sky, the temperature to drop.
Whatever Nasa science will tell us, if it is this alarming, it will only make the predictions of the Mayans more reliable. Get ready. Don't panic. Don't laugh,.get informed.
Any physicists out there want to comment on whether or not this could contribute to the global magnetic polarity switch everyone seems to think will happen soon?