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Sunspots Return
We're emerging from the longest, deepest sunspot drought since 1913 (we discussed its depths here) with the appearance of a robust group of sunspots over the weekend. Recently we discussed a possible explanation for the prolonged minimum. The Fox News article quotes observer Michael Buxton of Ocean Beach, Calif.: "This is the best sunspot I've seen in two years." jamie found a NASA site where you can generate a movie of the recent sunspot's movement — try selecting the first image type and bumping the resolution to 1024. The magnetic field lines are clearly visible.
"This is the best sunspot I've seen in two years."
I know it's popular here to say everything that comes from Fox News is complete bullshit, but maybe just once and a while they have a good article. We should be thankful for that.
CQ DX here we come! Time to hang wire and pound brass!
73, w7com
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Very strange, as magnetic field lines are entirely imaginary.
I guess you've never played with magnets and iron filings?
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
With the notable exception of 24h clocks.
who tagged this NSFW. Seriously.
It's nice to see the new solar cycle is flaring up. I miss those nice auroras we could this during the last solar peak. Haven't seen one in about 3 years now. Some were so bright that you could see them in the city, very early in the evening.(at 56ÂN Magnetic Latitude).
Is it just me and where I live or have last summer and winter been pretty warm while this current summer seems cooler with the return of the sun's spot ? ;-)))
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
I saw the tag but haven't seen this explicitly mentioned yet: one theory is that lack of sunspots causes Earth to warm up. (There is a very strong negative correlation between sunspot activity and temperature on Earth.)
Maybe now we'll find out who's right.
Sun? Didn't they go out of business or something?
Free Martian Whores!
like ANYTHING Fox News allegedly reports about the so-called "sun" would be worth listening to.
If you have to censor some from speaking out about science for fear of the scrutiny maybe your science isn't really science at all. Anyone who questions the validity of a theory should be heard. I know that there will be those who will try to mock you but the science is the truth in and of itself, not a side effect of your belief in the science.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
No, the magnetic field is real but invisible. Magnetic field lines, on the other hand, are simply a mechanism for representing (e.g., on paper) magnetic field orientation and strength. The lines themselves are not real. (Compare with, for example, a topographical map. The height of the earth's surface is real, but the lines on a topographical map are a representation of height; they're not real.)
No, they're quite real. Being immaterial aspects of electro-magnetism,
they are, however, normally invisible. Here, however, you can see the
superhot plasma flowing along them, much as you can get iron filings
on a piece of paper to do with an ordinary magnet.
Oh sure...
Like ANY opinion Anonymous Cowards have about the so-called "Fox News" would be worth listening to.
;)
Anyone who questions the validity of a theory should be heard.
Anyone who offers valid criticisms of your theory with data to back them up should be heard. Saying anyone who questions a theory should be heard might sound nice in theory, but in reality it means you have a bunch of people throwing out unsubstantiated garbage in order to muddy the waters and further their own agendas, which are rarely motivated by scientific concerns.
The increase in temperature of planet Earth caused by Global Warming has changed the ambient temperature in our Solar System ever so slightly. This has caused irreparable damage the the Sun's delicate jet stream. The Cap and Trade bill will be too late to prevent Supernova.
Go check it out at http://www.solarcycle24.com/
This guy's everything about the sun that one can track. In particular, he has an image of the sun on the upper left hand corner that shows how pathetic this sunspot group.
I wouldn't say the sunspot drought is over, until there is sustained progress.
This is my sig.
Because I betcha that if Congress gets Cap and Trade in place, throw in some Kyoto claims, that in a few years if we see a cooling trend beyond our current one, they will lay claim to proof they were right.
In other words, the salesmen won. No matter the out come they will claim to have proven themselves. In the end all we get will be more embedded taxes.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Yeah, because the field is not uniform the iron filings clump around the actual physical lines. It's the same thing with gravity - the field is not uniform, but concentrated along specific lines protruding out of the earth. Sometimes you get tripped up when you walk through one of the bigger gravitational field lines. Here in Michigan you can clearly feel them when driving your car through them - it feels like the road is all bumpy.
*end sarcasm*
The comment that they are imaginary does suggest that the plasma (or something) on the sun somehow concentrates the field much the way iron filings concentrate them. Once you have filings it concentrates the field and you get more filings attached to the end thus creating lines. Similar must occur on the sun or the lines would not be visible.
My density is fairly close to that of water, just like everyone else. I do have a degree in physics, though, if that helps.
Anonymous Coward: ready to doubt that shiny yellow thing is really the "sun", for no reason other than Fox News said it was.
Yeah, everything Fox says is automatically false.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
IIRC, the last time sunspots were at a minimum like this, earth was in the little ice age, and hundreds of millions of people died due to crops freezing, glaciers overrunning towns, disease, etc.
So maybe we're supposed to be in another little ice age, but all the greenhouse gases warmed the planet and saved us?
O____O
If you have to censor some from speaking out about science for fear of the scrutiny maybe your science isn't really science at all. Anyone who questions the validity of a theory should be heard. I know that there will be those who will try to mock you but the science is the truth in and of itself, not a side effect of your belief in the science.
This basically sums up the postmodern approach to science. When all truth is relative, then science itself has no basis for an exalted place in the hierarchy of rationality. With nothing to "prove" itself except itself, science becomes a rolling definition of "what works for me, today." From there, it's a small step to seeing science as a means, not an end... and specifically: a means of enacting social change.
Presto. :/
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Magnetic field lines are not really like the lines on a topographic map. The lines of a magnetic field represent paths from high potential to low potential, rather than delineations of equal-potential regions.
It's more like a river. The river flows perpendicular to the lines on the topographic map, from high to low, and its "line" is quite real, while the lines on the topographic map are not. Thus it is an unfair comparison to say magnetic field lines are "imaginary" in the same sense that contour lines on a map are. You cannot physically demonstrate the contour lines on a map, whereas you can demonstrate (with water or iron filings, as the case may be) a path from high potential to low potential.
IOW, inasmuch as there is a very real path that a drop of water will take when placed at any specific point on a 3-D surface, there is also a very real path that an electron will follow from a specific starting point in a 3-D electromagnetic field.
The lines themselves are imaginary, but they are real paths. Of course, there are infinitely many of the paths, densely packed, and so we pick only a few representative paths and call them the "magnetic field lines".
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
They're no more real than latitude lines. The magnetic field is continuous, it doesn't possess discrete lines. Objects IN the field can form a line, but that is more of a spontaneous symmetry breaking effect... I.E., iron filings could form a hundred distinguishable lines, or a thousand. The filings experiment is neat, but I think it gave millions of schoolkids the idea that there is an actual number of preferred lines running from one end of the magnet to the other.
A cone doesn't have a finite number of preferred paths down from the top. But if you pour water on the top, the water will run downhill and form a number of discrete streams. That does mean that there are 'lines of gravity'.
No, I'm pretty sure they're still around. They're the ones with the topless chick on the third page, right?
Obviously it's man-made global (solar?) warming that is causing this increased sunspot activity...
Anyone who offers valid criticisms of your theory with data to back them up should be heard.
Tell that to Pons and Fleischmann.
They might get a Nobel yet.
Probably not.
If cold fusion turns out to be, as it looks, a combination of erroneous measurements and wishful thinking, then they will be ignored and eventually forgotten.
On the other hand, if cold fusion turns out to have been a real effect after all, then somebody should hunt them down and shoot them, because by their actions, they made it look like bad measurements, chicanery, and hype, and thus made sure nobody would take it seriously. If there really was something there, their actions set science back significantly.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
That they are discrete, perhaps, is a misconception. You won't hear me claiming they're discrete.
A continuous field contains infinitely many paths from high to low potential, all of which are "lines". A representative few are used to approximate the field when we're drawing it, which leads to the misunderstanding about them being discrete.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
If the this sunspot cycle had kept on schedule, then the peak activity would have been around 2012. Each cycle Earthlings become more dependent on their satellites (e.g. GPS) and electric grid. Both of these can be severely disrupted by large solar storms. My pet hypothesis is that nastiness in 2012 could have been caused by the peak, but that is unlikely now.
That is one way to think about it but that isn't entirely correct. A line is a discrete mathematical construct. A field is a continuous function but a "line" is not. Think about it this way: let's say you have a piece of paper and some "string". You place several piece of string on the paper. There is "space" in between the pieces of string. You then proceed to add pieces of string in between the others. You can continue to do this ad infinitum (assuming smaller and smaller pieces of string) but they will never match the piece of paper, i.e. the continuous field. They can approximate it but it will never be the same.
In this way, the magnetic field "line" is a mathematical construct used to determine topology. Electric field lines and gravity field lines are much the same thing. There is nothing wrong with saying "magnetic field line" save that iron filings or plasma or whatever is not on a line but in a field. They can be used to visualize the field, so to speak.
Since there will of course be a lot of nonsense about this having implications for the reliability of the IPCC's statements on climate change and so on, it is worth posting the following:
We have direct measurements of incoming and outgoing solar radiation. We have satellites in orbit that detect incoming as well as outgoing radiation of all wavelengths. From these direct measurements we know that the recent change in outgoing radiation is greater than the changes in incoming radiation. We know that the change is in the region of the spectrum where CO2 and other greenhouse gasses absorb radiation the most. We also know from isotopic analysis that a majority of the increase in CO2 concentration is fossil in origin ( fossil fuels are virtually depleted in Carbon 14 since it decays radioactively over periods of several thousand years ), thus excluding the possibility that what we see is a feedback effect from changes in solar activity.
Thus we more or less know that the sun is not to blame, no matter how poorly we may understand its sunspots, cycles and whatnot. The change in radiation balance is due to neither a direct solar effect nor the type of feedbacks that occur during ice age termination. If either of the two was the case then the isotopic studies would have detected it since the CO2 in oceans and plants have comparable C14 concentrations as the atmosphere. Instead what we see is an increased concentration of fossil carbon in the atmosphere, and together with it a reduction in outgoing infra-red radiation consistent with the absorption spectra of the greenhouse gases we emit.
No. Think of each integral as "stretching" to the next dimension. The path become a surface, etc.
I think there is a bit of difference in thinking here. Most people are thinking of a line as a discrete thing that iron filings or plasma or whatever exist on, making the "lines" real. That was what I was trying to show with my example. You have the correct thought that the "line" is just a mathematical construct - your integration shows this.