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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."
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!
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.
'... 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.
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.
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.
/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.
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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.
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