(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
NOT!
The same crackpots who are denying that global warming is caused by humans and who are claiming that the whole solar system is about to catch on fire have latched onto a significant but not unprecedented hiccup in the timing of the latest sunspot cycle to prop up their outrageous claim that We Are Imminently Doomed By Forces Beyond Our Control So We Do Not Need To DO Anything But Wait For Death. To be totally fair, the Earth IS ultimately doomed by forces that are currently and probably forever beyond our capacity to control, but odds are we have at least a few hundred million years before we are forced to vacate the planet due to solar activity…
The current sunspot cycle IS ‘late’ for its ‘usual’ turnaround from minimum sunspot activity toward maximum, but…
…now it is showing all the right signs of getting cranked back up.
As late as September 4, we were still seeing a quiet Sun with few disturbances in the heliosphere: “…it is likely that the current year’s number of blank days will be the longest in about 100 years. It has not shown many signs of picking up the pace so far.”
Then, in mid-September, SOHO and GONG detected a “large active region” of the sun that was just beginning to rotate into our view and was within an area identified as “definitely a new solar cycle region” In the following image you can see this as a brighter spot below the middle of the sun’s disk on the extreme left edge.
More recently (Oct. 22- 27), “A Sunspot Blossoms”: “…Based on its position and magnetic orientation, this active region belongs to the new solar cycle. The active region has produced a number of small flares, bringing some interesting solar activity, long missed, to the Sun.” You can see this sunspot as a bright spot above center and to the right in the following image.
As I write this, the Solar Earth side is quiet, but the Solar far side looks more active. Keep checking the following sites over the next two weeks while the far side rotates into view. For the far side data see:GONG – far side and Stanford – far side. To keep up with recent Earth side solar activity, you can check this link to NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory “Pick of the Week” site. Or to get near real-time info go to this link. [At this moment, and on occasion, the real-time images are suspended while a “CCD bakeout” is done, which is basically an electronic cleaning of the detector elements in order to restore them to maximum sensitivity. I expect the real-time data to come back on-line soon.]
While you are on the SOHO site, you can explore the data/archive page for some really cool images and animations of solar phenomena. Also, make sure to check the latest graphed data on sunspots starting from around 1875 to the present. You’ll notice, particularly on the “butterfly” graph at the top, slight but definite indications of the beginning of the new cycle (via another excellent source for solar info – the Solar Physics page from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.)
Although merely ‘eyeballing’ graphs of long-term data is definitely not a scientific means of determining trends, you might also want to have a look at the 400 yr and 11000 yr graphs at wikipedia and see if you think we’re headed for an imminent and catastrophic failure of the solar cycle…
Other interesting Solar links to explore:
Mystery of the Missing Sunspots, Solved? 6.17.2009
Sluggish flow inside the sun may cause late sunspot cycle
NWS Space Weather Prediction Center
An interesting intro to sunspots and solar activity, including history via the Science Education Gateway
wikipedia also has info and a good list of links for further research on the Solar Cycle
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Questions anyone? Hope you enjoy reading about our source of light and life.
do sunspots have on the earth?
I read somewhere that there may be a correlation with more intense weather patterns.
Now what?
David Wilcock is about the only one on the internet with a positive take on this 2012 event. It would be pretty cool to evolve into the fourth dimension, all of us being like supermen and stuff.