'Still Sun' baffling astronomers

[katty]

more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8008473.stm

'Still Sun' baffling astronomers


The Sun is the dimmest it has been for nearly a century.

There are no sunspots, very few solar flares - and our nearest star is the quietest it has been for a very long time.

The observations are baffling astronomers, who are due to study new pictures of the Sun, taken from space, at the UK National Astronomy Meeting.

The Sun normally undergoes an 11-year cycle of activity. At its peak, it has a tumultuous boiling atmosphere that spits out flares and planet-sized chunks of super-hot gas. This is followed by a calmer period.

Last year, it was expected that it would have been hotting up after a quiet spell. But instead it hit a 50-year low in solar wind pressure, a 55-year low in radio emissions, and a 100-year low in sunspot activity.

According to Prof Louise Hara of University College London, it is unclear why this is happening or when the Sun is likely to become more active again.

"There's no sign of us coming out of it yet," she told BBC News.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

1. It's going to go out on 2012.

The ancient Dutch predicted it in their Book of the Dead.

[Echo In Light]

12. Odd...a co-worker and I were just discussing that

[hootinholler]

55. Dutch?

I haven't heard that one, I thought 2012 was a Mayan prediction.

-Hoot

[NightWatcher]

2. maybe it's about to putter out. Maybe it already has and we are living off the heat that is en route

[Bill McBlueState]

5. two more minutes until we know for sure

if the sun had actually turned off by the time you wrote that.

[NightWatcher]

8. or maybe now, or maybe now, or maybe now. We could always be on our last 2 minutes

[Arugula Latte]

3. The fundies will think it's a sign of End Times.

Of course, if the sun had become more active, that would have been a sign of End Times too.

[CreekDog]

6. Of course if the sun actually does dim enough it WILL be the end times

for us at least.

:rofl:

[hfojvt]

10. nah, that will be the perfect offset for global warming

We might have an ice age, but at least we could crank up the CO2. Damn the torpedos! Full speed ahead!!

[YOY]

15. Everything is a sign of end times to them.

You see...they're idiots.

[Iggo]

75. I think I like you!

:rofl:

[drm604]

4. So now we don't have to worry about global warming.

The sun is dimming in response to our warming. See, it's all very fine tuned! :sarcasm:

[Mari333]

7. shhhh. its sleeping. shhhhh. nt

[TahitiNut]

56. Be vewy, vewy qwiet.

:dunce:

[ben_jenne]

9. The sun has been doing what it does for billions

of years, the baffled astronomers for only an eye blink. How arrogant do they have to be?

Why is it that any time a scientist doesn't understand what is happening they are baffled, but they can still make pronouncements that they expect people to take seriously?

[Raine1967]

36. Are you sure you are talking about Scientists and not religionists? eom.

[ben_jenne]

40. I don't always see a lot of difference. n/t

[Bill McBlueState]

44. how is it arrogant

to admit that you don't completely understand something?

[Spike89]

48. Why the anti-scientist?

The real question you should ask is why journalists/headline writers use that word...baffling isn't it? And exactly how do you know that the pattern discrepency they are trying to understand has been occurring for billions of years? That's kind of an arrogant assumption on your part.

[Occam Bandage]

50. Yes, it's very arrogant when people admit they don't yet understand something,

and want to research it further.

[Bankhead_ATL]

11. Did this happen during the ice ages???

[bighart]

18. Actually yes.

At least in recorded history we have the "little ice age" from 1645 to around 1715 that had very similar solar activity and produced some very cold years. This cycle could very well have an impact on our climate.

[Bankhead_ATL]

20. hmm ... This last winter was colder....

[Renew Deal]

13. Thank God for Global Warming

:evilgrin:

[YOY]

14. That would be interesting...if it went out completely instantly.

We'd all be flash frozen as the temperature rapidly dropped to absolute zero within seconds.

From the top of the clouds to the bottom of the sea...one big ball of ice.

[Silent3]

21. Nah, cooling wouldn't be anywhere near that fast.

All that would happen is that the heat loss we currently experience from the dark side of the earth all of the time would be doubled. I don't know how to calculate the effect of that off the top of my head, but it would probably be hours or even days before conditions became unlivable over the entire surface of the earth. There might even be time for a few people to get into deep underground bunkers, although unless the sun came back pretty soon that would probably just delay the inevitable.

Given the right preparations (which perhaps have already been made somewhere for post-nuclear survival), and some method for dealing with the atmosphere being frozen, the interior of the planet would stay warm for a good long time and a small group of people could live for many years.

[YOY]

41. It would be less than an hour with no light except for man made light.

Almost reminds me of the Twilight Zone (or was it Outer Limits) episode where the Earth was moving towards the sun and things were boiling...paint melting off the walls.

It all turned into a cold induced nightmare of the main character in a world where the reality was just the opposite...the earth was moving away from the sun.

[Silent3]

45. Where do you get the figure of an hour from?

It takes about 8 1/3 minutes for light to travel from the sun to the earth, in case you're talking about the delay between the sun hypothetically blinking out and us noticing any effect from that.

My point is, however, that losing the light from the sun wouldn't cause instant extreme coldness. The air has thermal mass, the oceans have thermal mass, the land has thermal mass, our bodies have thermal mass... all of these things tend to hold heat for a time.

[YOY]

46. The air has thermal mass but we're talking near instant cut off of the primary source of heat.

The geothermal heat in the planet wouldn't even figure into the surface. It would be absolute zero -459.67' F/-273.15' C all the way around. The air would hold some of it's thermal mass as well as it could against absolute zero for about an hour as it rapidly chilled. We're not talking 0' C...were talking -273.15' C...cold would hit like an atomic bomb.

We really need a climatologist here with a geophysicist edge to do the math...and there are too many what ifs...like did the sun cool quickly or just disappear from existance.

[Silent3]

53. It's already nearly absolute zero half way around the planet...

...on the night side of the earth. When the sun goes down that air doesn't flash-freeze, does it? What keeps it warm? Only the outer layer of the atmosphere cools quickly. Each layer of atmosphere forms a layer of insulation for the layer below it. The lowest layer is warmed by land and water. For something to cool down its heat has to go somewhere, it has to be radiated or conducted away. Where would it go, and how would it go so quickly?

Since air doesn't flow from the light side of the earth to the dark side at speeds of many hundreds of miles per hour, and since lateral heat transfer through water, and even more so through land, is a very slow process, why doesn't the far night side of the earth, exposed for several hours to the cold blackness of space, with essentially no appreciable access to heat transfer from the day side, cool as quickly as you're imagining the whole planet would cool?

The most extreme day-to-night temperature drops I know of are in some deserts where, without the insulating effect of cloud cover, temperatures can drop over 70°F over night. That's about the fastest I think the earth would cool if the sun blinked out, 70°F every twelve hours. Where there's cloud cover, or ocean to provide more heat than land provides (because water is a better thermal conductor than land), the the rate of cooling would be slower.

Remember also that thermal transfer is most efficient when thermal gradients are large. The colder the earth got, the slower it would cool off. It would still only take a day or two for things to be very, very human-unfriendly, but I think it would still take several days for the atmosphere to liquefy, longer for it to freeze, and the oceans would take a very long time to freeze all the way down to the bottom.

Deep subterranean caverns could stay at livable temperatures for hundreds or thousands of years. One theory of the history of life on earth suggests that it's possible the earth was once struck, after life had already formed, by an asteroid so devastating that the entire surface of the earth became molten and stayed at unlivable for hundreds or thousands of years. Even under such extreme conditions, however, it's been calculated that bacteria could have survived within deep fissures and caverns, where temperatures would have remained far less extreme than on the devastated surface simply because it takes so very long for heat to travel through the mass of the earth.

[Xithras]

47. Someone did the math a number of years ago.

Basically, the last habitable bands around the equator would be livable up to a week later because of thermal radiation from the oceans. The oceans would take about a month to freeze completely over at the surface and would start freezing downward from there. Once the ice layer got thick enough, it would act as an insulator and actually trap heat from geologic activity below the surface, slowing the process.

On the surface though, the conditions would go from bad to worse in an extremely short amount of time. By the end of the first month all radiative heating (from both the sea and land) would have ended, and the surface temperature would plummet. With no heat source, the surface temperature would be plunging toward 2.7 kelvin by the end of the first year. At 2.7 kelvin, even the nitrogen will be frozen and the atmosphere will rain out of the "sky". By 18 months, the entire planet would exist in a bare vacuum.

The only real debate is about the state of the oceans after that. One mathematical model has the oceans persisting as mostly liquid for several hundred thousand years as the heat radiated from the core combats the absolute zero of space, and persisting for at least another billion as isolated water patches around volcanic vents.

Another model, though, has the ocean rapidly boiling off as the surface drops to a vacuum, and re-layering itself across the surface of the planet as a ten mile thick layer of snow.

The question is simply whether the ice blanket over the surface of the seas can form quickly enough, and strongly enough, to resist the pull of the vacuum and stay solid, the way the surface of Europa has.

[ddeclue]

73. It's actually pretty complicated folks...

the rate of cooling would be a function of the temperature differential between the earth and the surrounding space - the cooler the earth got, the slower it would cool until it reached equilibrium with the surrounding space.

It would be reasonable to assume a 40 degree drop per day for the first several days however. We'd all be dead inside a week except for those with access to nuclear power reactors hiding under ground.

[Solon]

64. It would also be impossible, first things first, we wouldn't reach absolute zero...

a few degrees above it, maybe, but there's always just enough ambient energy in space to prevent us from reaching absolute zero, at least until that energy(from the Big Bang) dissipates itself.

Of course, that's not going to happen, first off, the Sun is way too big to "go out" instantly, even if it were made of coal as people thought in the past, it wouldn't have went out instantly. Not saying it couldn't create a mini-ice age on Earth, but the sun's energy output would only have to decrease a percentage point or two for that to happen, it doesn't need to go out, so to speak to cause drastic changes on Earth.

In addition, for the sun to actually cool at any drastic rate would mean it exhausted its primary fusion material, hydrogen, and starting to fuse helium, this means the Sun would be entering its Red Giant phase, and that would be very bad for Earth, the oceans would boil, and then the Earth itself will become a molten fireball as the Sun envelops it and it sinks towards the suns center mass as it expands. Of course, luckily, this isn't going to happen for a few billion years yet.

[Silent3]

16. Clearly, it's a solar depression.

Everyone thought the price of hot plasma would keep going up and up. Thermal gradients were leveraged 40-to-1. Trillions of solar credits were tied up in exotic instruments like CDSs (Coronal Default Swaps). When the bottom fell out of the plasma market, the whole system collapsed.

[Angleae]

27. But it's too big to fail.

:P

[liskddksil]

32. Breaking, Congressional leaders are currently debating a bailout for the sun

Mcain is talking about cancelling the first debate...

[Angleae]

38. Republican leaders introduce legislation to privatize the sun

Stating "American business can do a much better job of providing heat and light and at a reasonable cost. Too many people are using that energy for free and not contributing to it's upkeep."

[GreenPartyVoter]

54. I think I just wet myself laughing!

:spray::rofl:

[ddeclue]

70. DUZY Alert!

:rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:
:rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:
:rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:
:rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:
:rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:
:rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:
:rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:
:rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:

[spelldmilk]

68. Ha! That's really funny! n/t

[Beetwasher]

17. Cycles Within Cycles

The 11 year cycle may simply be a smaller cycle within a larger cycle. So this longer period of inactivity may simply be a part of that larger cycle about which we don't have enough long term data to analyze.

[Soylent Brice]

19. booooorring. why can't it just explode.

the sun is such a wimp.

what's the matter?? has consuming yourself by eating vasts amount of hydrogen, fueling fusion reactions become too tiresome???

waaaah waaaaaaaaah.

[Beetwasher]

22. Maybe It's Switching To Cold Fusion?

:shrug: :evilgrin:

[Soylent Brice]

31. eh

a "likely" excuse.

:sarcasm:

[Davis_X_Machina]

23. An event like the ...

Maunder minimum can't be predicted and can't even be determined until after the fact.

[Beetwasher]

25. If It Is A "Minimum" Event, We May Be Damn Lucky In That

It could buy us some time to deal w/ global warming/C02 emissions before the effects become catastrophic. :shrug:

IOW, it could act as a temporary counter balance while we get our shit together.

[kestrel91316]

28. Unfortunately, a cold spell would just lull people into WORSE complacency.

[IDFbunny]

29. Global warming and cooling both caused by the sun

and man need not take any responsibility. We are slaves to the sun's moods they are saying already.

[kestrel91316]

34. Just a silly, lame excuse to keep behaving like spoiled brats, IMHO.

[Spike89]

59. Sadly, it could be unavoidable

People too often act like spoiled brats, but a mini ice age would be useless for the purposes of helping the global warming problem anyway. A mini ice age would force a surge in energy production as people struggle to keep warm and fed. At the same time we'd see a drop in some current alternative energy sources (solar and ethanol for instance).

The worse part is that the ice age would be mini, but the extra carbon and greenhouse gases would almost certainly outlast it, possibly resulting in a boomerang effect once the ice age lifted.

[kestrel91316]

60. Now you're thinking. I spend nights awake going over these problems.

It's a mess; we're probably screwed; but we still have a DUTY to try to mitigate the environmental harm that generations have done.

[Spike89]

65. No doubt! Just no easy solutions

I'm more afraid that a mini ice age would seem to set us up for worse. It's kinda like a sunbather asleep too long on the beach, a cloud passes by and they wake up strip off the sunscreen and go back to sleep.

[Beetwasher]

30. Maybe

For sure the rightwingers will say "See, there's no global warming! It's cooling!".

I can have hope though the more reasonable minds will prevail and appropriate measures can be instituted during a "reprieve" granted by the sun so that we can get our shit together before it's too late.

[kestrel91316]

35. "Cooling", my ass, lol. Yesterday be blew a heat record out of the water

here. The previous record of 93 or 94 was in 1998. Yesterday we hit 104. And last December was the coldest ever here, IIRC. Worsening extremes, increasing climate instability and unpredictability - right on schedule based on increasing CO2.

[Raksha]

66. It was actually 97 degrees here in San Bernardino.

In April - I couldn't believe it! It's cooling off today, though.

[Silent3]

42. We've got to sell carbon reduction on multiple fronts.

One reason why it annoys me so much when right wingers are in denial about global warming is that they use that denial as an excuse for a do-nothing attitude toward reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, but global warming is only one reason among other goods reason to get off oil, coal, and gas: reducing other forms of pollution, reducing our dependence of foreign energy, and reducing the rate we consume non-renewable resources like oil that have so many other better uses apart from burning them up, like making plastics and medicines.

[hunter]

24. uh oh...

...maybe it's more like the water flowing off the beach on the approach of a big wave...

Even if it's just the usual tides, our sandcastles are still doomed.

Have a nice day! :hi:

[leftofthedial]

26. "The Sun's fundamentals are strong!"

...at least according to John McCain.

[ddeclue]

71. DUZY Alert!

[Politicalboi]

33. It's Solar Panels

Damn it, we are using up the Sun. Big oil just figured it out.

[annabanana]

39. AAHH hahahahahahahahhahaha

GOOD one!

[Kansas Wyatt]

37. Okay, the UFOs sprayed Anti-Sunspots and Anti-Solar Flares lotion on the Sun...

The United States officially asked the UFOs at Area 51 to give us a little help dealing with the Global Warming Crisis, so the UFOs agreed to give us some time to get everything set up and in place.

In exchange, the United States agreed to double the number of people available for alien abductions and threw in more cattle to be mutilated. The UFO Aliens also agreed to go easy on the probes.

[katty]

43. Sun to Earth: "hey, get your s*** together, you're burnin' me out

you humans are exhausting!

[cobalt1999]

49. So now the Sun is in a Recession too.

Who knew the Sun was tied to the stock market index?

[BlueJazz]

51. Probably the sun is affected by our Global Warming.

[slackmaster]

62. Yes, some kind of feedback mechanism we don't understand

:hide:

[bertman]

52. We need to ask Rev. SUN Myung MOON what the "Myung" stands for. Could be a clue.

[lildreamer316]

57. I wonder how this fits into the twin star theory n/t

[Bill McBlueState]

69. How do you think it might? n/t

[Raksha]

58. I just flashed on this and maybe someone more knowledgeable can follow up

This is the year of "Blessing the Sun" according to the traditional Hebrew calendar. In fact, it just happened a few weeks ago. I know very little about it, except that it only occurs once every 28 years, and there is a special ceremony that takes place at that time. The only holiday that occurs less frequently is the Jubilee Year, which happens every 50 years.

I am NOT implying cause and effect here, because I don't believe the Universe operates that way. If the events are linked at all, they are linked by meaning (synchronicity) and not causality.

Again, if anyone more knowledgeable than me about traditional Judaism can follow up, it would be much appreciated.

[Bill McBlueState]

72. solar minimum happens every 11 years

So every 308 years, the Hebrew holiday coincides with solar minimum. The solar cycle wasn't yet discovered 308 years ago, so this is the first time people have the opportunity to ascribe meaning to the "Blessing of the Sun" falling during solar minimum. You're working from a blank slate, essentially, which could be fun.

[chollybocker]

61. C'mon, can't a flaming gaseous orb take a little vacation every 300 billion years or so?

[RagAss]

63. We're in the middle of the Big Bang folks, there's no precedent for anything !

[Thothmes]

67. Global Warming?

[The Straight Story]

74. We will find out what is going, we just need to water board it

:)