Sun's Fading Spots Signal Big Drop in Solar Activity

[osoab]

Sun's Fading Spots Signal Big Drop in Solar Activity (http://www.space.com/11960-fading-sunspots-slower-solar-activity-solar-cycle.html)


by Denise Chow, SPACE.com Staff Writer
Date: 14 June 2011 Time: 03:50 PM ET
This story was updated at 3:54 p.m. EDT.

Some unusual solar readings, including fading sunspots and weakening magnetic activity near the poles, could be indications that our sun is preparing to be less active in the coming years.
The results of three separate studies seem to show that even as the current sunspot cycle swells toward the solar maximum (http://www.space.com/11893-huge-sun-eruption-spectacular-solar-flare.html), the sun could be heading into a more-dormant period, with activity during the next 11-year sunspot cycle greatly reduced or even eliminated.

The results of the new studies were announced today (June 14) at the annual meeting of the solar physics division of the American Astronomical Society, which is being held this week at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.
"The solar cycle may be going into a hiatus," Frank Hill, associate director of the National Solar Observatory's Solar Synoptic Network (http://www.space.com/11960-fading-sunspots-slower-solar-activity-solar-cycle.html#), said in a news briefing today (June 14).
The studies looked at a missing jet stream in the solar interior, fading sunspots on the sun's visible surface, and changes in the corona and near the poles. [Photos: Sunspots on Earth's Star (http://www.space.com/11842-photos-sunspots-sun-solar-cycle-weather.html)]
"This is highly unusual and unexpected," Hill said. "But the fact that three completely different views of the sun point in the same direction is a powerful indicator that the sunspot cycle may be going into hibernation."

Spots on the sun

Sunspots are temporary patches on the surface of the sun that are caused by intense magnetic activity (http://www.space.com/11858-dark-sunspots-origins-explained.html). These structures sometimes erupt into energetic solar storms that send streams of charged particles into space.
Since powerful charged particles from solar storms can occasionally wreak havoc on Earth's magnetic field by knocking out power grids or disrupting satellites in orbit, a calmer solar cycle could have its advantages.
Astronomers study mysterious sunspots because their number and frequency act as indicators of the sun's activity, which ebbs and flows in an 11-year cycle. Typically, a cycle takes roughly 5.5 years to move from a solar minimum, when there are few sunspots, to the solar maximum, during which sunspot activity is amplified.
Currently, the sun is in the midst of the period designated as Cycle 24 and is ramping up toward the cycle's period of maximum activity. However, the recent findings indicate that the activity in the next 11-year solar cycle (http://www.space.com/8587-sun-strange-behavior-baffles-astronomers.html), Cycle 25, could be greatly reduced. In fact, some scientists are questioning whether this drop in activity could lead to a second Maunder Minimum, which was a 70-year period from 1645 to 1715 when the sun showed virtually no sunspots. [Video: Rivers of Fire Inflame Sunspots (http://www.space.com/11616-rivers-fire-inflame-sunspots.html)]
Hill is the lead author of one of the studies that used data (http://www.space.com/11960-fading-sunspots-slower-solar-activity-solar-cycle.html#) from the Global Oscillation Network Group to look at characteristics of the solar interior. (The group includes six observing stations around the world.) The astronomers examined an east-west zonal wind flow inside the sun, called torsional oscillation. The latitude of this jet stream matches the new sunspot formation in each cycle, and models successfully predicted the late onset of the current Cycle 24.
"We expected to see the start of the zonal flow for Cycle 25 by now, but we see no sign of it," Hill said. "The flow for Cycle 25 should have appeared in 2008 or 2009. This leads us to believe that the next cycle will be very much delayed, with a minimum longer than the one we just went through."
Hill estimated that the start of Cycle 25 could be delayed to 2021 or 2022 and will be very weak, if it even happens at all.
The sun's magnetic field
In the second study, researchers tracked a long-term weakening trend in the strength of sunspots, and predict that by the next solar cycle, magnetic fields erupting on the sun (http://www.space.com/30-amazing-sun-photos-space.html) will be so weak that few, if any, sunspots will be formed.
With more than 13 years of sunspot data collected at the McMath-Pierce Telescope at Kitt Peak in Arizona, Matt Penn and William Livingston observed that the average magnetic field strength declined significantly during Cycle 23 and now into Cycle 24. Consequently, sunspot temperatures have risen, they observed.
If the trend continues, the sun's magnetic field strength will drop below a certain threshold and sunspots will largely disappear; the field no longer will be strong enough to overcome such convective forces on the solar surface.
In a separate study, Richard Altrock, manager of the Air Force's coronal research program at NSO's facility in New Mexico, examined the sun's corona and observed a slowdown of the magnetic activity's usual "rush to the poles."
"A key thing to understand is that those wonderful, delicate coronal features are actually powerful, robust magnetic structures rooted in the interior of the sun," Altrock said. "Changes we see in the corona reflect changes deep inside the sun."
Altrock sifted through 40 years of observations from NSO's 16-inch (40 centimeters) coronagraphic telescope.
New solar activity (http://www.space.com/11893-huge-sun-eruption-spectacular-solar-flare.html) typically emerges at a latitude of about 70 degrees at the start of the solar cycle, then moves toward the equator. The new magnetic field simultaneously pushes remnants of the past cycle as far as 85 degrees toward the poles. The current cycle, however, is showing some different behavior.
"Cycle 24 started out late and slow and may not be strong enough to create a rush to the poles, indicating we'll see a very weak solar maximum in 2013, if at all," Altrock said. "If the rush to the poles fails to complete, this creates a tremendous dilemma for the theorists, as it would mean that Cycle 23's magnetic field will not completely disappear from the polar regions. … No one knows what the sun will do in that case."
If the models prove accurate and the trends continue, the implications could be far-reaching.
"If we are right, this could be the last solar maximum we'll see for a few decades," Hill said. "That would affect everything from space exploration to Earth's climate."


There is a video at the link that can't be embedded.

[oldmansmith]

If true, this should give the global warming crowd something to think about when the Hudson River freezes over in Manhattan.

[EE_]

don't look now, but...

http://iswa.gsfc.nasa.gov:8080/IswaSystemWebApp/iSWACygnetStreamer?timestamp=2038-01-23+00%3A44%3A00&window=-1&cygnetId=261

[JJ.G0ldD0t]

This could be ugly.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/controlled-power-cuts-likely-as-sun-storm-threatens-national-grid-2296748.html


Officials in Britain and the United States are preparing to make controlled power cuts to their national electricity supplies in response to a warning of a possible powerful solar storm hitting the Earth. In an interview with The Independent, Thomas Bogdan, director of the US Space Weather Prediction Centre, said that controlled power "outages" will protect the National Electricity Grids against damage which could take months or even years to repair should a large solar storm collide with the Earth without any precautions being taken.
 Dr Bogdan is in close discussions with scientists in the UK Met Office to set up a second space weather prediction centre in Britain to co-ordinate a global response to a threat viewed seriously by both the US and UK governments. One topic of discussion is how to protect national electricity grids from the immense power surges caused by the geomagnetic storms which happen when highly energetic solar particles collide with the Earth's magnetic field.
The most vulnerable parts of the grid are the hundreds of transformers connected to power lines many miles long that can experience sudden current surges during a geomagnetic solar storm, Dr Bogdan said. "It points to a potential scenario where large parts of either North America or northern Europe may be without power from between days or weeks, to perhaps months and, in extreme cases, there are estimates that it could last years," Dr Bogdan said.


The aim of the joint US-UK collaboration is to improve solar weather forecasting to a point where it is possible to warn power companies of an imminent storm. There is a feeling that if a "category 5" solar storm – the biggest of the five categories – were to be predicted, then taking the grid off-line before it is due to hit Earth and letting the storm pass would be better than trying to keep things running, he said.
In 1989, a solar geomagentic storm knocked out the electricity grid across large parts of Canada. The loss cascaded across the United States and caused power problems as far away as California. The greatest fear is a massive storm as big as the one documented by astronomer Richard Carrington in 1859, which burnt out telegraph wires.
"The sort of storms capable of doing that are fairly rare events. We refer to them as 'black swans'," Dr Bogdan said. "If the Carrington event occurred today, and power grid operators did not take efforts to safeguard their infrastructure, then we could be facing a scenario like that."
video at the link

[Horn]

God is waiting for everyone to put their information commerce transactions on internet servers & handheld devices, before he wipes out the internet.


A plage is a bright region in the chromosphere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosphere) of the Sun (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun), typically found in regions of the chromosphere near sunspots (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunspots). The term itself is poetically taken from the French word for "beach." The plage regions map closely to the faculae (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faculae) in the photosphere below, but the latter have much smaller spatial scales. Accordingly plage occurs most visibly near a sunspot region. Faculae have a strong influence on the solar constant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_constant), and the more readily detectable (because chromospheric) plage areas traditionally are used to monitor this influence. In this context "active network" consists of plage-like brightenings extending away from active regions as their magnetism appears to diffuse into the quiet Sun, but constrained to follow the network boundaries.
Because we can explain faculae with the strictly photospheric "hot wall" model,[1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plage_%28astronomy%29#cite_note-0) it is not clear what the actual physical relationship between plage and faculae may be.

[Horn]

don't look now, but...

http://iswa.gsfc.nasa.gov:8080/IswaSystemWebApp/iSWACygnetStreamer?timestamp=2038-01-23+00%3A44%3A00&window=-1&cygnetId=261

Cool link, I like the ying/yang plan view.8)

[Glass]

don't look now, but...

http://iswa.gsfc.nasa.gov:8080/IswaSystemWebApp/iSWACygnetStreamer?timestamp=2038-01-23+00%3A44%3A00&window=-1&cygnetId=261


Cool graphic. It looks like we only got the tail end of the storm. I wonder what it would be like if we were broadsided by one of these flares. I assume that is a model and not real time imaging. It would have to be a long way away to take images like that I think.

[keehah]

Chaos theory predicts we will notice if the butterfly stops 'flapping'. ;)
Or a snake (fish?) not eating its tail?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect

In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions; where a small change at one place in a nonlinear system can result in large differences to a later state. For example, the presence or absence of a butterfly flapping its wings could lead to creation or absence of a hurricane.

http://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full/2005/32/aa3459-05/img2.gif
http://www.aanda.org/index.php?option=com_article&access=standard&Itemid=129&url=/articles/aa/full/2005/32/aa3459-05/aa3459-05.right.html

[Horn]

No More 2012 Solar Maximum for Cycle 24? How Small Will Solar Cycle 24 Be?



The number of cosmic rays reaching Earth are lower when the sun is active and has a strong, turbulent magnetic field that interferes with cosmic ray travel. But when the sun is not active, more cosmic rays reach Earth. The sun is supposed to be in an increasingly active period of Solar Cycle 24 with a solar maximum originally expected in 2011 to 2012. But the sun has been abnormally quiet. Scientists have not seen such a persistently low sunspot number for at least a century. Further, the magnetic field of the sun is at the lowest strength measured in at least 50 years.

Beginning six months ago, ACE satellite data showed a rise in cosmic rays reaching Earth from the Milky Way galaxy. By now, cosmic ray intensity has increased 19% because our sun is so quiet that its reduced magnetic field isn’t deflecting cosmic rays like it has the past few decades. If our sun remains quiet, there could be a 30% increase in cosmic rays reaching Earth in the next year or so – an intensity not seen since 1960. Increased cosmic rays can damage electronic systems and even DNA in living creatures.

What has happened to our sun? NASA’s Heliospheric Team Leader, David Hathaway, says he cannot find another solar minimum in the past that has acted quite like this one that has put out only a few sunspots since Solar Cycle 24 officially began at the end of 2008. Our sun is so quiet that solar physicists from around the world gathered in September to discuss whether we are entering a period similar to the Maunder Minimum of 1645 to 1715, when for 70 years the sun was spotless and there was a mini-ice age. There was no ACE satellite then, but measurements of beryllium concentrations in ice layers indicate that during the Maunder Minimum, cosmic rays were 2.5 times what they are now. Dr. Hathaway points out that Earth scientists did not start measuring cosmic rays until the beginning of the modern Space Age in the early 1960s, and that for the past five decades, our sun might have been unusually active.

David Hathaway, Ph.D., Heliospheric Team Leader, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama: “In the 50 years or so we’ve been making the (cosmic ray) measurements – yeah! this is by far the highest level of galactic cosmic rays that we’re seeing at Earth and we know exactly what is causing it. It’s the sun’s weakened magnetic fields and weakened solar winds that are all related to this Solar Cycle 24 minimum.

Beryllium is produced in the Earth’s upper atmosphere by cosmic rays striking nitrogen in particular and you find it in ice cores. If you look back at the record, there are significant changes. But, the amount that you see also depends on the strength and variations of the Earth’s magnetic field.
For twelve years, NASA has had a satellite positioned a million miles in front of Earth with the sun about 92 million miles beyond. Its mission has been to study particles that come near Earth from our sun, the solar system and the galaxy. The satellite is called Advanced Composition Explorer, or ACE, and some of the highly energetic particles ACE has been monitoring are cosmic rays.

Periods like the Maunder Minimum occupy about 15% of the time. If you looked over thousands of years of Beryllium 10, it looks like 15% of the time, the sun is in this quiet state where it’s not producing sunspots. Given that, we’re about due. And I think that’s what comes up and why people are actively talking about grand minima like the Maunder Minimum is that if you go by percentages and the fact it has been so active, then we’re about due (for a long minimum).

We don’t have records prior to 1874 that give us details about the sun. Compared to the past 130 years, our sun now is unprecedented as far as how slow this Solar Cycle 24 is taking off - or not taking off!

http://thecosmicheart.blogspot.com/2009/11/no-more-2012-solar-maximum-for-cycle-24.html

[keehah]

Last month or two aside, now back to quiet sun. Spaceweather reports 0 sunspots today.

http://www.spaceweather.com/

[April 9, 2012] ALMOST-BLANK SUN: In case you needed a reminder that this solar cycle is the weakest in decades, take a look at the solar disk. Today it's almost blank

Lots of recent data graphed here:

The sun is still in a funk: sunspot numbers are dropping when they should be rising (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/02/the-sun-is-still-in-a-funk-sunspot-numbers-are-dropping-when-they-should-be-rising/)
March 2, 2012 wattsupwiththat.com

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/solar-polar-fields-1966-now1.png

I thought this winter we had the 22 year (most interactive with earth) solar maximum magnetic pole flip.

gold-silver.us/forum/showthread...In-other-words-the-world-goes-mad (http://gold-silver.us/forum/showthread.php?49967-In-other-words-the-world-goes-mad)

[Neuro]

So maybe we already had the maximum? It looks like the drop after the maximum in previous cycles... If so colder times ahead.

[Horn]

Thats a pretty good chart, you can see the frequency change about 2004.

From what I've read it takes about 10yrs for the effects to show on Earth.

[Neuro]

The sun did rev up the activity somewhat in March, from February, but now it has almost no sunspots...

http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/sunspot.gif

[Horn]

Still only 30% of a "normal" peak progression.

[Bigjon]

McCanney reports many comets crashing into the sun over the last month, causing all the huge solar flaring.

mp3 link starts at about the 25 minute mark (http://www.jmccanneyscience.com/JamesMcCanneyScienceHour_April_05_2012.mp3)

[Horn]

No More 2012 Solar Maximum for Cycle 24? How Small Will Solar Cycle 24 Be?

For twelve years, NASA has had a satellite positioned a million miles in front of Earth with the sun about 92 million miles beyond. Its mission has been to study particles that come near Earth from our sun, the solar system and the galaxy. The satellite is called Advanced Composition Explorer, or ACE, and some of the highly energetic particles ACE has been monitoring are cosmic rays.

The number of cosmic rays reaching Earth are lower when the sun is active and has a strong, turbulent magnetic field that interferes with cosmic ray travel. But when the sun is not active, more cosmic rays reach Earth. The sun is supposed to be in an increasingly active period of Solar Cycle 24 with a solar maximum originally expected in 2011 to 2012. But the sun has been abnormally quiet. Scientists have not seen such a persistently low sunspot number for at least a century. Further, the magnetic field of the sun is at the lowest strength measured in at least 50 years.

Beginning six months ago, ACE satellite data showed a rise in cosmic rays reaching Earth from the Milky Way galaxy. By now, cosmic ray intensity has increased 19% because our sun is so quiet that its reduced magnetic field isn’t deflecting cosmic rays like it has the past few decades. If our sun remains quiet, there could be a 30% increase in cosmic rays reaching Earth in the next year or so – an intensity not seen since 1960. Increased cosmic rays can damage electronic systems and even DNA in living creatures.

What has happened to our sun? NASA’s Heliospheric Team Leader, David Hathaway, says he cannot find another solar minimum in the past that has acted quite like this one that has put out only a few sunspots since Solar Cycle 24 officially began at the end of 2008. Our sun is so quiet that solar physicists from around the world gathered in September to discuss whether we are entering a period similar to the Maunder Minimum of 1645 to 1715, when for 70 years the sun was spotless and there was a mini-ice age. There was no ACE satellite then, but measurements of beryllium concentrations in ice layers indicate that during the Maunder Minimum, cosmic rays were 2.5 times what they are now. Dr. Hathaway points out that Earth scientists did not start measuring cosmic rays until the beginning of the modern Space Age in the early 1960s, and that for the past five decades, our sun might have been unusually active.

David Hathaway, Ph.D., Heliospheric Team Leader, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama: “In the 50 years or so we’ve been making the (cosmic ray) measurements – yeah! this is by far the highest level of galactic cosmic rays that we’re seeing at Earth and we know exactly what is causing it. It’s the sun’s weakened magnetic fields and weakened solar winds that are all related to this Solar Cycle 24 minimum.

Beryllium is produced in the Earth’s upper atmosphere by cosmic rays striking nitrogen in particular and you find it in ice cores. If you look back at the record, there are significant changes. But, the amount that you see also depends on the strength and variations of the Earth’s magnetic field.

Periods like the Maunder Minimum occupy about 15% of the time. If you looked over thousands of years of Beryllium 10, it looks like 15% of the time, the sun is in this quiet state where it’s not producing sunspots. Given that, we’re about due. And I think that’s what comes up and why people are actively talking about grand minima like the Maunder Minimum is that if you go by percentages and the fact it has been so active, then we’re about due (for a long minimum).

We don’t have records prior to 1874 that give us details about the sun. Compared to the past 130 years, our sun now is unprecedented as far as how slow this Solar Cycle 24 is taking off - or not taking off!


http://thecosmicheart.blogspot.com/2009/11/no-more-2012-solar-maximum-for-cycle-24.html

[Horn]

Hey, I just reposted the same article again.

Is it me (probably) or is there just not enough news on this?

[Bigjon]

so they're trying to tell us that the beryllium that is falling on us every day is a natural occurrence and not in any way related to those planes with the funny long lasting contrails that I prefer to call chemtrails??

[ShortJohnSilver]

So what is the answer? Move to Florida so you end up living like you would if you lived in NH ?

[Horn]

so they're trying to tell us that the beryllium that is falling on us every day is a natural occurrence and not in any way related to those planes with the funny long lasting contrails that I prefer to call chemtrails??

No, They're trying to tell us in a roundabout way that the now doubled up, and added beryllium (from chemtrails) will prevent the first reaction from occurring, and cosmic ray penetration will increase exponentially.

[Silver Rocket Bitches!]

I wouldn't rule out another Carrington Event..

[General of Darkness]

Doom?

[keehah]

Doom?
Chill.
{**}
Pole reversal shows asymmetries do exist in sun (http://zeenews.india.com/news/space/pole-reversal-shows-asymmetries-do-exist-in-sun_770981.html)

zeenews.india.com April 21, 2012

Currently the polarity at the north of the sun appears to have decreased close to zero – that is, it seems to be well into its polar flip from magnetic north to south -- but the polarity at the south is only just beginning to decrease.

“Right now, there’s an imbalance between the north and the south poles,” said Jonathan Cirtain, a space scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., who is also NASA’s project scientist for a Japanese solar mission called Hinode.

“The north is already in transition, well ahead of the south pole, and we don’t understand why,” he explained.

One of the two papers relies on Hinode data that shows direct observations of this polar switch. The other paper makes use of a new technique observing microwave radiation from the sun’s polar atmosphere to infer the magnetic activity on the surface.

The asymmetry described in the papers belies models of the sun that assume that the sun’s north and south polarities switch at the same time. In addition, both papers agree that the switch is imminent at the north pole..
Sun may soon have four poles, say researchers (http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201204200075)

ajw.asahi.com April 20, 2012 By SEIJI TANAKA/ Staff Writer

The sun may be entering a period of reduced activity that could result in lower temperatures on Earth, according to Japanese researchers.

Officials of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and the Riken research foundation said on April 19 that the activity of sunspots appeared to resemble a 70-year period in the 17th century in which London’s Thames froze over and cherry blossoms bloomed later than usual in Kyoto.

In that era, known as the Maunder Minimum, temperatures are estimated to have been about 2.5 degrees lower than in the second half of the 20th century.

The Japanese study found that the trend of current sunspot activity is similar to records from that period.

The researchers also found signs of unusual magnetic changes in the sun. Normally, the sun’s magnetic field flips about once every 11 years. In 2001, the sun’s magnetic north pole, which was in the northern hemisphere, flipped to the south.

While scientists had predicted that the next flip would begin from May 2013, the solar observation satellite Hinode found that the north pole of the sun had started flipping about a year earlier than expected. There was no noticeable change in the south pole.

If that trend continues, the north pole could complete its flip in May 2012 but create a four-pole magnetic structure in the sun, with two new poles created in the vicinity of the equator of our closest star.

http://dwqovw6qi0vie.cloudfront.net/article-imgs/en/2012/04/20/AJ201204200075/AJ201204200076M.jpg

[Horn]

Masons from Cygnus changin my DNA. OO)~


The effect of Cosmic Rays on Human DNA Decoding Evolution Destiny...

http://www.dnatube.com/video/11858/The-effect-of-Cosmic-Rays-on--Human-DNA-Decoding-Evolution-Destiny-of-Humankind


Andrew Collins: 2012 Cygnus & Egypt Mystery Pt.2/6




http://www.disclose.tv/action/viewvideo/27778/Andrew_Collins__2012_Cygnus__amp__Egypt_Mystery_Pt _3_6/


http://tcaa.us/Astronomy/Messier/Images/M39y.jpg





What makes a quasar into a blazar is the sheer fact that one of those twin jets is aligned near perfectly with our line of sight. Imagine looking down the end of a twelve-bore shotgun as one of its barrels is discharged. Having been expelled, the buckshot emerges as a tight cone that gradually expands and loses energy and momentum the further away it gets from the gun. Now consider that a blazar is like looking down the end of a vast cosmic gun barrel which, although many light years away, still sprays you with cosmic buckshot in the form of electromagnetic radiation and high-energy cosmic particles—not enough to cause you or the planet any noticeable harm but enough for this cos*mic bombardment to be detected by scientific instrumentation. Blazars are likely to be supermassive black holes at the heart of distant galaxies. However, we now have one in our own neighborhood, and this is Cygnus X-3, which al*though 30,000 light years away is actually quite close in astronomical terms ...http://atlantisrisingmagazine.com/2010/09/01/the-secret-of-cygnus-x-3/