Buckle up folks - it's comin' down the pike headed straight at us
Solar Cycle #24 - from
Science@NASA:
Is a New Solar Cycle Beginning?
The solar physics community is abuzz this week. No, there haven't been any great eruptions or solar storms. The source of the excitement is a modest knot of magnetism that popped over the sun's eastern limb on Dec. 11th, pictured below in a pair of images from the orbiting Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).
It may not look like much, but "this patch of magnetism could be a sign of the next solar cycle," says solar physicist David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center.
For more than a year, the sun has been experiencing a lull in activity, marking the end of Solar Cycle 23, which peaked with many furious storms in 2000--2003. "Solar minimum is upon us," he says.
The big question now is, when will the next solar cycle begin?
It could be starting now.
"New solar cycles always begin with a high-latitude, reversed polarity sunspot," explains Hathaway. "Reversed polarity " means a sunspot with opposite magnetic polarity compared to sunspots from the previous solar cycle. "High-latitude" refers to the sun's grid of latitude and longitude. Old cycle spots congregate near the sun's equator. New cycle spots appear higher, around 25 or 30 degrees latitude.
The region that appeared on Dec. 11th fits both these criteria. It is high latitude (24 degrees N) and magnetically reversed. Just one problem: There is no sunspot. So far the region is just a bright knot of magnetic fields. If, however, these fields coalesce into a dark sunspot, scientists are ready to announce that Solar Cycle 24 has officially begun.
Cool! Warm actually, periods of high Solar Activity usually result in a general warming trend to the climate. There are certainly other factors involved but this contrinutes...
Unafortunatly, the people who have the sceince will be spending more time playing Whack-A-Mole with the climate change "Troofers" but at least, the cycle is something that we can point to and then point to a climate temperature map and say: See???
Oh yeah, Wiki on:
Solar Cycle
The nice news is that we will have more Auroras. The bad news is that we will have more Auroras (they play hob with satellites and large power transmission lines).
Oh yeah #)2 - the magnetism is so strong, the electrical currents are so huge that the magnetism affects the polarization of the sun's light, element by element. They use a narrow-band filter, look at the sun and determine the polarity with a polarimeter.
Posted by DaveH at January 5, 2008 9:22 PM
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