Weak Solar Convection 100 Times Slower Than Predicted

An anonymous reader writes about an observation that convection in the outer layer of the Sun seems not to behave how it ought to: "These new findings based on SDO imagery, if verified, would upend our understanding of how heat is transported outwards by the Sun and challenges existing explanations of the formation of sunspots, the magnetic field generation of the sun, not to mention the concept of convective mixing of light and heavy elements in the solar atmosphere. 'However, our results (PDF) suggest that convective motions in the Sun are nearly 100 times smaller than these current theoretical expectations,' continued Hanasoge, also a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Plank Institute in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany. 'These motions are indeed that slow in the Sun, then the most widely accepted theory concerning the generation of solar magnetic field is broken, leaving us with no compelling theory to explain its generation of magnetic fields and the need to overhaul our understanding of the physics of the Sun's interior.'"

Comments

The simplest explanation

[EmagGeek]

If you get results that fly in the face of decades of peer-reviewed research, your first instinct should not be to believe you've upended physics as we know it. Your first instinct should be, "Oh shit, what did I fuck up?"

My money is on the "results" being wrong.

Re:The simplest explanation

[Splab]

They are not flying against decades of peer reviewed research - earlier data were projections; those will tend to be massively wrong, just look at your local weather forecasts...

Re:The simplest explanation

[Drethon]

Right. When an observation conflicts with years of previous observations, double check the most recent observation. When an observation conflicts with years of theory and computer models...

Re:The simplest explanation

[eggstasy]

It's called Google. Here's a whole bunch of places where you can see a similar article:
http://www.science-news.eu/astronomy-news/cluster142794/

And here's the actual paper:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.3173v1.pdf

Re:The simplest explanation

[SirGarlon]

Sometimes decades of peer-reviewed research is wrong. Not very often, I admit, but it is exactly to find such occasions that people do science in the first place. I don't think we should discourage researchers from reporting unorthodox findings.

Instead of making veiled accusations when someone announces an unexpected finding, the correct response is to take a careful look at it. If accusations of fraud or ineptitude are warranted, peer review will make that clear.

Of course, I wholeheartedly agree that researchers should check their work and subject it to peer review before they call a press conference. I still remember the "cold fusion" fiasco. Like cold fusion, this result is nothing until it's passed thorough review.

Re:The simplest explanation

[Boronx]

But then you'd have to admit that they could be right.

Re:The simplest explanation

[kelemvor4]

Ok! Ok! I must have, I must have put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. Shit. I always do that. I always mess up some mundane detail!

Oh! What is this fairly mundane detail, Michael?!!!!!

Re:The simplest explanation

[bunratty]

A result reached in only one reviewed paper is often next to nothing. That's why science requires repeatability. Any particular scientific paper stands a good chance of being wrong, for a number of reasons. If the paper requires a 5% probability or less of getting the results by chance alone, and most papers that get negative results are not published, then there's a higher than 10% probability that a published paper's results were obtained through chance alone -- the researchers were just lucky. Then there are numerous mistakes that can be made, although many of these mistakes are weeded out in peer review. And some scientists fudge the data or just publish outright fraudulent research.

On the other hand, if there are hundreds of research papers published over decades of research, and the vast majority of papers get results that are consistent with each other, and scientists have reached a consensus that the research is valid, then that's a completely different story. Unfortunately, most people (even Slashdot posters) can't distinguish between these two very different cases.

In this case, though, it looks like the numerous papers published previously were mere predictions. This latest paper provides observations that do not match the predictions. If these observations are repeatable, then it looks like the predictions were just wrong.

Re:The simplest explanation

[Anonymous Coward]

There are no such thing as "degrees Kelvin." Kelvins are not degrees.

You should have wrote it like this:
For example, if they predict 305 Kelvins, it's usually correct to within 1 or 2 Kelvins. It doesn't end up being 30500 Kelvins, or 3.05 Kelvins.

Bosonic Disruptor

[MacGyver2210]

Once again, I blame this phenomenon squarely on the Higgs Boson.

Electric Sun?

[Bobb Sledd]

Forgive me for asking a basic question, if it is one. Assuming these observations are indeed correct, does this make any part of the idea of an electric sun more plausible than the current model of the sun? If string theory seems more like physics than magic, then why is even the direction of the idea toward an electric sun absurd?

Re:Electric Sun?

[cusco]

A couple of reasons, one of which is that the electric sun people can't even come up with an even vaguely coherent hypothesis for how their supposed electric circuit is supposed to work, and it explains almost none of the observed solar phenomena. The enormous quantity of electrons that are supposed to be streaming in from the interstellar gas (because they think that the interstellar gas heats the sun, not gravitationally-induced heating and hydrogen fusion) should be easily observable, in fact they should be constantly producing auroras visible all the way to the equator, but no electrical flux of this magnitude has been observed.

Like the idea of 'morphic fields' the 'electric universe' foolishness is unlikely to die for a long time, in spite of the absolute dearth of evidence for it and better explanations for which evidence does exist.

How does this affect age estimates for the Sun

[borroff]

What I would like to know is how this change in measured convection rate affects our models of solar lifecycles. Granted, this may be a methodology error; IANAP (anymore), so I can't answer that question, but it seems to me some important new questions arise as a result of this finding. Does this mean stars age slower than we thought, or faster - or is the rate unchanged? Is the overall heat transfer is slower, is some other known mechanism transferring more heat, or is there some unknown transfer mechanism we have yet to discover? There's a lot of work for some lucky grad students out there.

Electric Universe crackpots

[uigrad_2000]

The Electric Universe crackpots have always claimed that convection had nothing to do with it.

I've been fascinated with the thunderbolts.info site for quite a while. They haven't yet convinced me that we need to throw out our conventional understanding of the universe, but they have some extremely fascinating theories, and I'm disappointed that I haven't seen any serious responses to their theories.

Re:Could this lead to new physics?

[cusco]

They sound hot!