Solar Sleuths Tackle the "Quiet Sun"

For the past couple of years, our Sun has been at the minimum of its 11-year activity cycle. Its face has been virtually spotless for months on end, and there've been no dire alerts of titanic solar storms about to slam into Earth.

The problem is that this "quiet Sun" has continued far too long — two years ago, a special task force predicted that the transition from the just-ended Cycle 23 to the upcoming Cycle 24 would come around March 2008. It didn't. (To be fair, there was sharp disagreement within the group at that time.)

Much fanfare accompanied the appearance of a tiny high-latitude sunspot in early 2008, supposedly heralding Cycle 24's arrival. Yet for months and months afterward the Sun's face remained spotless.

Knowing when the upturn in solar activity begins and, more importantly, how strong it'll get at maximum has grown in importance over the years. When the Sun gets agitated, it buffets our planet with huge "storms" of high-speed plasma (ionized gas), punctuated by threatening flares of relativistic protons.

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/skyblog/newsblog/48607432.html

:shrug:

;)

There are Chinese sunspot records going back nearly 3000 years. At the same time the Romans were starting to think about connecting their farming villages into a nation, the Chinese were already reading, writing, and recording everything from the weather to the night sky to sunspot patterns. We have SOLID records going back to the 1600's, when the first telescopes were used to record the surface in more detail.

All of those observations support an 11 year cycle.

That's not to say that long periods of inactivity haven't been detected before. There have been several minimums that have lasted up to 50 years...all of which coincided with global temperature drops. The Little Ice Age coincided with the last one. We're not 100% sure of a correlation, but there's one unfortunate fact...sunspots occur when the sun is at its hottest, and go away when the sun cools down.

Meaning that the vacuum is almost complete in this so-called bubble. No dust and almost nothing even at the atomic level.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the Quiet Sun... I'd sure think so.

The Sun rotates but the core rotates faster than the surface. Imagine magnetic lines like rubber brands, they get twisted up until they snap and when they snap a sunspot or other activity forms.

However we are not exactly sure why the activity varies but it may be due to changes in the sun's ability to deal with magnetic stress.

learning about this back in college astronomy. And if I remember correctly, the sun's spotless cycle should be ending now. And to the contrary to the above poster, I do believe they have been able to calculate these cycles far back. One of the big fears is getting a major solar flare up, like that one that struck the Earth in 1859, during the height of the sun's solar activity. It wiped out telegraph networks across the country, some literally catching on fire, the height of technology of the time. Now, imagine if such a flare were to strike us today with the mass networks of computer and electrical grids we so dearly depend on. The fact of the matter is, when it happens, we are screwed big time.

Say good-bye to this civilization. We shouldn't have broadcast all our crap on television. It makes us all look stupid and unworthy of our sun's protection.

The Sun loves us. It's a wise and omnipotent guardian that answers our prayers whenever it's not busy driving its golden chariot across the firmament. Spotlessness is its natural state. The reason it developes spots is that we're wicked, and don't have any virgins left to sacrifice.

as all the other religions. I'll take it!

is the main reason there are no virgins left. It's all that rape and pillaging and situational ethics (IOKIYAR).

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

However, there has been some solar prominence activity despite the lack of sunspots.

Little Ice Age

The Maunder Minimum coincided with the middle — and coldest part — of the Little Ice Age, during which Europe and North America, and perhaps much of the rest of the world, were subjected to bitterly cold winters.

If we had another 80 years of virtually no sunspots we might not need to worry about global warming.... Of course catastrophic global cooling would be an even worse problem.

Where are the evil geniuses when you need them?