The Sun's 'Quiet Period' Explained

Arvisp writes with this excerpt from the BBC: "Solar physicists may have discovered why the Sun recently experienced a prolonged period of weak activity. The most recent so-called 'solar minimum' occurred in December 2008. Its drawn-out nature extended the total length of the last solar cycle — the repeating cycle of the Sun's activity — to 12.6 years, making it the longest in almost 200 years. The new research suggests that the longer-than-expected period of weak activity may have been linked to changes in the way a hot soup of charged particles called plasma circulated in the Sun."

Comments

Just Pushes Back The Question

[Mikkeles]

'... may have been linked to changes in the way a hot soup of charged particles called plasma circulated in the Sun.

So why did the "hot soup of charged particles called plasma" change in the way that they circulated?

This is why I hate most science reporting

[NeutronCowboy]

The headline, and the first few paragraphs make it sound like this is a solved problem: theories were proposed, experiments were done, results were verified and a conclusion was concluded.

Instead, what actually happened is completely murky. There is no mention of which satellites were used to gather data, or which organization collected it, or how data was used to support the conclusions. It seems that some people ran some computer simulations where they could replicate the current cycle by changing some parameters of the solar conveyor belt. But that's a guess, because the article says nothing. And to really make the article useless, there's the obligatory counter-point from a random scientist who says something completely different, again without any explanation of why.

Journalists ought to learn that science reporting is not like Entertainment or even Politics reporting. It doesn't really matter who said what, but only why they say and how they came to the conclusions. I'm not holding my breath though.

Re:This is why I hate most science reporting

[Mashiki]

Journalists don't have a clue. Which is why from law to science reporting is garbage. From why fruit flies die so quickly, to anything in relation to climate or weather, to why bad guy X got 5yrs in jail for insert crime here. From a lawish point of view let me add this, every once and awhile I spend time in court being a witness for this, or that, or something else. There's always some reporter, from some news agency there if it's anything big. I will tell you now, if I wasn't in the court myself, I'd have no clue that the article I was reading had any relation to the case, if my name wasn't in there somewhere.

That's how far removed reporting is from reality these days.