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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."
You want solar maximum? No soup for you !
Divide a cake by zero. Is it still a cake?
This is slashdot, not preschool. You can use your big-boy words with us.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
What's this nonsense about inactivity? The most recent java update I can find is July 7, 2010. What's that? You mean there's more than one sun?
The teachers will crack any minute, purple monkey dishwasher.
You: We should nuke the sun from orbit!
Moderator: The nuke won't make it into orbit, it's too hot.
You: Let's go at night, then.
Moderator: Oh yeah, of course!
That's right. The sun's solar minimum is not caused by global warming, nor is the hottest decade on record caused by the sun's solar minimum. Pass it on to any idiots you know who keep saying "It's just the sun!"
Generally after I've spent a night spewing out hot liquids and gasses, I need a day or two to sleep it off. I can imagine plasma makes for an even worse hangover.
The fact is that global warming is caused by the earth not letting go of the heat it collects from the sun. Thus it seems obvious that this solar activity is caused by the earth stealing too much heat and actually cooling the sun measurably. Soon it'll be a cold husk all due to the fossil-fuel burning SUVs that people insist on driving.
You have destroyed the solar system BP, I hope you are happy!
[/sarcasm]
I had just put this town to Oracle's takeover of The Sun. Guess that's why I'm not an astronomer.
Carousel is a lie!
'... 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?
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Probably Photino birds wreaking havoc with the sun.
There is a blight more serious than Global Warming, it is cyclical and is happening now. Run for the hills. Beware the political campaign signs.
Actually, there was talk of that back in the 1970s. I don't remember if there was any serious science behind it or not. It could have just been a general cultural concern because of all of the fears of a Nuclear Winter.
- doug
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.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
may have been linked to changes in the way a hot soup of charged particles called plasma circulated in the Sun
Um, yeah, and the recent heat wave in the western part of the U.S. may have been linked to changes in the way a hot soup of particles called atoms circulated in the atmosphere...
Seriously. /. needs to stop voting dreck into the stream and start doing real story selection and summary editing. Because the value added per editorial second is dropping like a rock.
You made me laugh out loud! Thanks!
How long will it take until the Sun enters the "quiet period" again? How "loud" will it be until then?
Yes, it's sarcasm. Deal with it!
What you say? Climate change has only been going on for the last 12 years of the last solar cycle and was directly discussed in the article?
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
In the 70s it wasn't clear which effect was winning, cooling due to aerosal particles (soot) in the atmosphere or warming due to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. It turns out that warming was winning which became clear in the late 70s and 80s. There was no consensus at any time saying that global cooling would be a problem long term. However, this debate did get mixed together with the discovery of the orbital cycles which cause the ice ages which predict another one thousands of years from now . So you got some popular science articles warning about global cooling and a new ice age.
Yes, they do understand it. They understand it so well you don't need to repeat again the same old joke that inevitably appears here every time there's an article about the sun.
"There is a blight more serious than Global Warming, it is cyclical and is happening now. Run for the hills. Beware the political campaign signs."
Right. The entire world is waking up to the horrible fact that there will be no more episodes of 'Lost'.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
I sincerely hope moderators understand tongue in cheek humor.
Since your "humor" is based on a nasty strawman caricature, you deserve all the downmods you get. Saying something blatantly stupid and insulting and then retreating behind "but I was joking!" is a classic bit of troll cowardice.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Regardless of the quality of your material, be prepared to be a frequent guest on F0X News.
Table-ized A.I.
"What you say?
Who are you, an ex-Zero Wing translator?
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Do you have a point? Or was that just an exercise in crimes against grammar and cohesive thought?
Oh yeah, those 'cycles' that science comes up with, what a crock, like the so-called 'water cycle' that evil 'private research institutions' acknowledge. Everybody knows that rain just materializes in the sky rather than condensing from evaporated surface water.{/sarcasm}
I mean really, are so you so dumb and so blindly focused on attacking 'private interests' (of all things) that the best you can come up with is 'rar! cycles are inventions of corporate fat cats!'
Ugh. I'm getting really sick of all the stupid anti-corporatism for anti-corporatism's sake.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
a 'cycle' is invented.
Yes because there are no cycles at all in nature.
Hello? Just because we can't explain something fully doesn't mean we can't spot repetitive behavior. These observations have value, if only to serve as the starting point for an explanation by someone smarter than us at some point in the future.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Class ignorance.
Sometimes the best humor is humor which makes light of strawmen.
Probably best to simply say, "Whoosh!", in your case. Dry humor is not for everyone.
Grow up. Trolling doesn't add to the discussion. just because you're a scientifically illerate fool who puts your politics before science doesn't mean
A) that AGW doesn't exist
B) that scientists don't know how the sun works and haven't already accounted for it's energy variations
C) that people who disagree with you are doing so for political reasons
D) that anyone has ever tried to blame everything on global warming
E) that weather is climate and climate is weather
F) that your back yard is representative of the real world
Hint: at the bottom of that solar minimum we were STILL WARMING, though we did detetct a slowing of the warming trend that can be directly connected to the lowering activity. a slowing, not a cessation of warming, not a reversal.
While your comment adds no end of profundity to the discussion, I'm sure.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
/facepalm
Give me a break. The solar activity cycle has been documented and studied since the early '60's (if not prior). We use it to design appropriately rad-hardened components in the spacecraft industry. We analyze required mission lifetimes and chart solar activity for the projected lifespan of the spacecraft as variations in solar activity affect everything from solar cell degradation to magnetic drag induced on your spacecraft. Hell, I can eve give you a citation. Go find yourself a copy of Fundamentals of Space Systems ed. II by Vincent L. Pisacane. Crack it open to Chapter II: The Space Environment. Read pages 50 through 60. It's all laid out in the basics there. If you want more detailed info. go crack into a journal of astrophysics sometime....
So put away the hatred of science and go back to doing whatever it is you do.
Of course, if you were being sarcastic and/or satirical, I completely failed to pick up on it due to a lack of sarcasm tags around your post.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
You: We should nuke the sun from orbit!
Moderator: The nuke won't make it into orbit, it's too hot.
You: Let's go at night, then.
Moderator: Oh yeah, of course!
Slashdot: Aren't the nukes technically already in orbit?
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
I like the, "redundant", moderation which implies its obviously the truth, and therefore redundant.
The moderators have really become insanely ignorant these days. I wonder if the demographic has profoundly changed in recent times. Based on comments and moderations, it suggests both lower IQs and the far less learned haunt slashdot these days.
Finally some evidence to prove my new theory I will soon propose: Global Cooling.
You're going to have to wait a few thousand millenia though before people will believe you. You're just a little ahead of your time.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
That is the thing about astroPhysics, that I really like. Any problems that occur isn't our fault. Here on Earth because everything is so tightly interconnected every problem can somehow be blamed on human intervention, and I am not denying that. But it is nice to have things that isn't our fault.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Well, I'll agree with you that most seasonal holidays have been pretty much commercialized. endjoke.
But what are the seasons, if not natural cycles? Was it a corporate plot of the first humans in order to maximize crop yields?
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Are you being critical of the research? TFA talks about a study of the completed solar cycle 23. We're currently IN Solar Cycle 24, which the article you reference predicts will peak in 2012. They may be right. Of course we'll never know, since the Mayan calendar clearly shows the end of the world in 2012, but that's another story. Or is it?!?
The sun is 4.6 BILLION years old and we are concerned with a couple of years difference in the Solar Cycle? How many of our empirical evidence cycles have we measured in this sort of accuracy? The whole cycle measures within 2.3e-8% of its lifespan and we are surprised that we haven't got the accuracy narrowed down? What other natural phenomenon have we measured to this accuracy cause I would really like to see the ruler that was used...
What got your panties in a twist? Just because something might vary over 4.8 Billion years has nothing to do with the fact that based on our current set of measurements this period was a bit longer. Hell, it doesn't matter if we measured only ONE other cycle, we could STILL make the observation "Hey, this cycle is longer than the last one".
However since you did ask. Sunspots were what we first used as a 'ruler'. Discovered in 800 BC, drawn later, and eventually the cycle was first showin in 1843 using data going back to 1755. We now know sunspot data (from historical observations not always available to the first discoverers of the cycle) going back to 1610.
And it's not like it's a 'slight' cycle either. These things vary by 150+ appearances per day during the peak, down to a dozen or fewer during the minimum.
Take a look at this picture: http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/Zurich_Color_Small.jpg
You don't exactly have to be a statistical wizard to see a pattern in that data.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
That's likely the root of the problem. Even a hint of truism brings ire and censorship rather than a spotlight for humor. Coincidentally, its probably censorship from the same people who like to complain about censorship on slashdot.
"Why" is the question that children repeatedly ask until adults get bored. All science can do is move one step at a time, answering one set of questions so that the next set of "why"s are visible.
Ultimately you get back to "god did it" or "everything exploded from nothing". Neither of which are enlightening.
Deleted
That's an odd reason to change the name, seeing as how the globe has only kept getting warmer.
I agree, but I deal with rainfall and watershed data. The engineers talk in 20, 50 and 100 year events and these are no where nailed down to any sort of accuracy. even the full 400 year measuring period is looking at is still 8.7e-7% of the lifespan of the sun we have looked at such a small window and drawn an assumption over that window. We are definitely going to be wrong. heck we cant even predict tomorrows weather accurately, let alone something we measuring at a distance, where we are still only theorizing about how it actually works. "slight" variances on a cosmic scale may not be measured in years.
Most likely the "redundant" comes from variations of this joke appearing every time there's an article about any sort of temperature change in any place other than the earth.
A joke may be funny or not the first time you hear it but it's never funny after you hear it several times.
No, it's solar warming on the sun. If only the sun reduced its emissions by switching to Hydrogen fuel...
In the beginning, there was null.
There was also concern that widespread use of supersonic transport would add to the problem and force global cooling.
Trying for "funny" is dangerous to your karma. If you succeed, people get a good laugh but your karma's the same. If you fail, you're going to be modded troll, flamebait, overrated, or offtopic and your karma will suffer. Even if your joke just isn't funny.
The moral? Shy away from humor unless you don't care about karma or you're sure you joke will make somebody spew coffee out of their nose. And sorry, but your joke just didn't cut it.
Free Martian Whores!
Yeah, the sunspots themselves are cooler, but total solar irradiance is lower during a solar minimum, and higher during solar maximum. So while I am not saying for a fact that you don't know what the hell you're talking about and are stupid for still thinking it's just the sun... Wait that's exactly what I'm saying.
Meh, we're due in like, 20 million years or something anyway.
Might as well be now on the galactic time scale. On the universal time scale it pretty much already started.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
it's really more of a hot ragout, so there you go, the fancy words we actually use.
You can't handle the truth.
Phew! For a second there I thought you were about to announce you'd beaten me to *my* new theory that I will soon propose: Global Worming.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
...is not the worst thing that can happen. Particularly when we are talking astrophysics.
I prefer the option where it IS "our" fault compared to one where the cause of trouble is completely out of our hands.
Cause if we can break it, we can probably fix it to. Not easily, but there is a chance.
Fixing something caused by the Sun... well... not this civilization.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
there cycles being in nature does NOT mean that 'private research institutions' can suddenly start inventing numerous 'cycles' just in a decade, whereas there have been only a set amount of cycles invented since the start of scientific revolution.
Because as we all know, the pace of scientific and technological advancement is perfectly constant.
And, if you're in extreme denial, you can see evidence of a cycle yourself, if you've got the patience to take a look at the sun (filtered/projected) and note the spot number for ~20 years. There's data since 1750. Sunspots are correlated with auroras, so it's also within the reach of a human with no modern equipment to check the effects of sun activity.
No, the change was because people mistaking localized effects for proof that the globe wasn't warming. Some spots might see lower average temperatures due to changes in cloud cover, rain fall, etc. while the overall global temperature is still higher.
For all the people that think that global warming is some conspiracy, publish a reproducible proof in a journal that shows it. You will win a nobel prize and a lifetime of funding.
I am not in anyway affiliated with Max Cannon
You clearly have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
I don't know of a single scientific idea that has been "set" for any significant length of time, let alone set since the start of scientific revolution. Even those stalwart cornerstones of physics, the Laws of Thermodynamics, have changed over the last 160 years.
The idea that we know all the "cycles" that exist and haven't been discovering new ones is not just ignorant, it's idiotic. Seriously, read a book about science sometime. I don't care what it is, I guarantee you'll learn something.
Cosmology has seen incredible advancements in the last 30 years. The Sun is very much a part of that. The current state of the Sun has never been studied before, hell 100 years ago some scientists still thought the sun was made of molten rock! Scientists are seeing these circumstances (longest solar minimum in a century) for the first time, and every new observation raises questions that beg to be answered.
I find your entire position to be simply ignorant in the extreme. It's like you stop paying attention to science after middle school 30 years ago.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Give me a break. The solar activity cycle has been documented and studied since the early '60's (if not prior).
Furthermore, we can measure the activity a lot better now than we ever could in the past, which allows our understanding of those cycles to grow and expand.
The GP is incredibly ignorant.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
yet another troll. as was pointed out above, this solar cycle was a minimum of activity (i.e. less solar energy incoming on earth) and during this same period, the temperature still went up. not that climate change is actually about such short spans of time, but your jumped to conclusion isn't even supported anecdotally by this evidence.
I am not in anyway affiliated with Max Cannon
Obviously Winter was invented by a secret cabal including the top scientists of Sears, Target, Walmart, Burlington Coat Factory, and Coca-Cola (those santa pics pre-date winter by at least a decade!) in order to sell cold weather clothing.
I can't believe all you sheep have been so blind for so long.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
that this had something to do with an IPO?
They changed it to be "climate change" some time ago so no matter if the globe "cools" or "warms", some people can equally claim the sky is falling and push through their unrelated political agendas.
It's nice to hear from Slashdot's "partisan dumbass" constituency, but that has nothing to do with the history of the term.
"Global warming" was first used, AFAIK, by Wally Broecker in 1975, but for most of the 1970s and 1980s, most papers on the subject didn't use the term. "Climate change" was sometimes used, and note that the "CC" in the abbreviation IPCC (founded in 1988) refers to "climate change".
"Global warming" entered the public vocabulary mostly in 1988 after James Hansen's testimony to Congress. Scientists continued to talk about "climate change" among themselves, but increasingly used "global warming" when speaking to the public, as that's what was being used in newspapers.
After increased concern about thermohaline circulation collapse (which can cause localized cooling in response to overall warming), public confusion between weather and climate (a cold winter doesn't mean the globe isn't warming), and realization that the public was ignoring important non-temperature impacts (such as precipitation changes), scientists reverted back to "climate change" when speaking to the public. But, again, amongst themselves they have pretty much always used the term "climate change".
Oracle.
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
...and order Sex on the Beach.
So, what you're saying is...
Cracking jokes on slashdot is an indicator of balls of steel and/or bulletproof karma?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Attempting humor in any part of society is always risky. There is no such thing as a joke that isn't potentially offensive to someone.
Unfortunately, it seems like more and more people whose statements have the potential of becoming public have to tread a line so fine that they often end up saying nothing at all.
I don't remember for sure, anymore, but I think it was George Burns who said that the least risky part of public comedy was having your joke fall flat. The most risky part was jail time.
The moral? Shy away from humor unless you don't care about karma or you're sure you joke will make somebody spew coffee out of their nose.
If you have a tried and true formula for making someone spew coffee out of their nose, you should probably be on the comedy circuit. Perhaps you should copyright it ;-)
Come on, now. Karma on slashdot, from a realistic standpoint, is meaningless. Making people laugh, that's priceless.
GSVEMR
Maybe that's because every single "bad" weather event is publicized by the media, politicians, so-called "scientists" as proof of global warming.
Note that the vast majority of that "warming" is at higher latitudes where the instrument record is sparse and the temperatures are interpolated over great distances. Unless you think assigning a value for an area via a thermometer that is 1200 km away is "robust". To put that in perspective, that's like saying "I can tell you the temperature in Philadelphia by using a thermometer in Chicago". Or, for those on the other side of the pond, "I can tell you the temperature in Stockholm by using a thermometer in Paris".
As the CRU emails have shown, when you have a small group of reviewers who can effectively dictate what is and is not published, there is little chance of a contrarian, yet robust, paper from ever seeing the light of day. One could choose to self-publish, but then those same gate-keepers cry "It's not in a peer-reviewed journal!".
That's why I said "caused by" and not "causing".... this comment was just a test on how well you and the rest of /. can read. It was obviously meant as joke but got a troll mod. Nuff said.
being concerned about a cycle has nothing to do with the total life of the thing. That is like saying "Earth is >4 billion years old and we are concerned about the fact that the sun didn't rise for 2 days?"
I agree, but I deal with rainfall and watershed data. The engineers talk in 20, 50 and 100 year events and these are no where nailed down to any sort of accuracy. even the full 400 year measuring period is looking at is still 8.7e-7% of the lifespan of the sun we have looked at such a small window and drawn an assumption over that window. We are definitely going to be wrong. heck we cant even predict tomorrows weather accurately, let alone something we measuring at a distance, where we are still only theorizing about how it actually works. "slight" variances on a cosmic scale may not be measured in years.
I understand where you are coming from (mostly).
Remember the Earth just about as old as the Sun (possibly even older depending on when you consider Earth, Earth and not a protoplanetary blob). Our current weather/preciptation models would be bunk even 100,000 years ago.
For this section of time, with no evidence to the contrary, 400 years of data is easily sufficient for me to forcast 1 month out. I would bet my entire life's savings that there would be less than 150 sun spots 1 month from now (I'd probably make the bet for 1 year from now as well)
Contrast this with data we are getting from Arctic Ice cores, which have been shown to correspond to an 11 year cycle (isotopes created from heavier bombardment in the ionosphere).
Of course over the lifetime of the planet these things are going to change. But it is VERY unlikely that these things are going to change very much in one 11 year period. (or even 100-200 years)
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Recent increases in electricity generated by solar power.
Prolonged Solar minimum.
Is nobody else seeing the Correlation here? Solar panels are stripping the sun of it's plasma-soup.
Its funny how anything that debunks GW is labeled troll....
Even burning hydrogen isn't all that efficient. Sun should research fusion. But I bet we'll get it going first.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Oh great, cue another global warming flamefest...
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
What I want to know is when its time to key up the 10 meter rig
I think it was George Burns who said that the least risky part of public comedy was having your joke fall flat. The most risky part was jail time.
I've been physically assaulted for jokes.
If you have a tried and true formula for making someone spew coffee out of their nose, you should probably be on the comedy circuit.
I wish! I've had plenty of jokes modded "troll" and "flamebait". But I've also had people curse me for making them spew coffee out of their noses.
Come on, now. Karma on slashdot, from a realistic standpoint, is meaningless. Making people laugh, that's priceless.
I agree, but I think if my karma was in trouble I would refrain from cracking wise.
Free Martian Whores!
I guess I should get me some anti-corrosive, self-lubricating underwear for may steely balls then.
Or should that be underware?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I've been physically assaulted for jokes.
Ditto. Not twice, tho. Not yet. Didn't have to pay their hospital bills, either. I might have to visit that particular bit of karma on a neighbor, soon, however. I'll survive it. He won't.
Even here, where one would expect a certain level of humor, it often falls flat.
I agree, but I think if my karma was in trouble I would refrain from cracking wise.
I will not refrain from being honest, nor cracking jokes; "karma" on slashdot is an artificial thing that has nothing to do with real life.
I find it pretty sad that anyone really cares about that. Honestly, who cares? It's just a website.
Whatever.
GSVEMR