What's wrong with the sun?

[n2doc]

14 June 2010 by Stuart Clark

SUNSPOTS come and go, but recently they have mostly gone. For centuries, astronomers have recorded when these dark blemishes on the solar surface emerge, only for them to fade away again after a few days, weeks or months. Thanks to their efforts, we know that sunspot numbers ebb and flow in cycles lasting about 11 years.

But for the past two years, the sunspots have mostly been missing. Their absence, the most prolonged for nearly a hundred years, has taken even seasoned sun watchers by surprise. "This is solar behaviour we haven't seen in living memory," says David Hathaway, a physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

The sun is under scrutiny as never before thanks to an armada of space telescopes. The results they beam back are portraying our nearest star, and its influence on Earth, in a new light. Sunspots and other clues indicate that the sun's magnetic activity is diminishing, and that the sun may even be shrinking. Together the results hint that something profound is happening inside the sun. The big question is what?

The stakes have never been higher. Groups of sunspots forewarn of gigantic solar storms that can unleash a billion times more energy than an atomic bomb. Fears that these giant solar eruptions could create havoc on Earth, and disputes over the sun's role in climate change, are adding urgency to these studies. When NASA and the European Space Agency launched the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory almost 15 years ago, "understanding the solar cycle was not one of its scientific objectives", says Bernhard Fleck, the mission's project scientist. "Now it is one of the key questions."

more

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627640.800-whats-wrong-with-the-sun.html

[Gman]

1. And it makes for ominous but stupid local news segments

during a slow summer news period.

[FSogol]

2. "Damn BP, they broke the sun" or "Why hasn't Obama fixed the sun yet?"

:shrug:

[damntexdem]

3. Oh no: solar warming!

Well, at least human activities probably didn't cause that -- probably.

But if it's time for the sun to alter its behavior a little, even if this has happened many time before, this is likely not a good time for the earth to be affected by such changes. At least, likely not a good time for us to have earth so affected.

[rrneck]

4. I guess it'll go crazy in 2012.

On edit: I just noticed this is post 3666 for me. 666! That's it, we're done! Rapture! Sunspots! Cats sleeping with dogs! Oh, the humanity!

Or not...