

Strange Doings on the Sun - jbillmann
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304672404579183940409194498

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nmcveity
I visited Mt Wilson on the weekend and took the tour there. One part of the
tour took us inside the 150ft solar tower operated by UCLA. I was surprised to
see that they recorded sunspot activity by sketching diagrams by hand.

And they put them on the web. If you want to see "puzzling" lack of sunspot
activity, here it is:

[http://obs.astro.ucla.edu/cur_drw.html](http://obs.astro.ucla.edu/cur_drw.html)

~~~
anigbrowl
I hope this is some masochistic exercise forced on young astronomers to make
them appreciate what their forbears had to do before they're let loose on the
computers.

I'm also puzzled as to why the date is logged as 11 December, since it's the
11th of November.

~~~
GFischer
Edit: I found this interesting piece which details how Steve Padilla has been
doing the drawings for 40 years!

[http://www.latimes.com/local/columnone/la-me-c1-mt-wilson-
su...](http://www.latimes.com/local/columnone/la-me-c1-mt-wilson-sun-
spots-20131028-dto,0,4430093.htmlstory)

He says: he likes the tradition, this convergence of science and art.

"The value," he says, "is not so much in the individual achievement but in
maintaining the daily record."

However, the telescope's annual budget of $250,000, cobbled together with
grants from NASA and the National Science Foundation, runs out in the spring,
and Ulrich says odds of getting more money from NASA are long.

Edit - previous speculation I wrote: Hmmm.. maybe Steve Padilla wrote it as
12-11-2013 (like we write it in South America) instead of 11-12-2013 like in
the U.S. ?

~~~
anigbrowl
I said '11 Dec 2013' so I don't think it's euro/US date format confusion (and
I'm Euro myself, so I wholeheartedly approve of putting the mday before the
month like every other sane person).

~~~
anigbrowl
s/I/It

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ced
For more context, I recommend looking at the two graphs here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunspot#Variation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunspot#Variation)

In particular, the Maunder minimum was a period of very low solar activity in
the 17th century which contributed to the Little Ice Age. The drop in
temperature impacted agricultural yields around the globe. [1]

That said, my professor would say that it's too early to infer much from this
cycle's low sunspot number. The solar dynamo is very unpredictable in general,
and quite possibly chaotic. Next cycle could be above average and that
wouldn't shock anybody in solar physics.

[1] For instance:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_Dynasty#Economic_breakdow...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_Dynasty#Economic_breakdown_and_natural_disasters)

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Zenst
I do wonder having recently read about a comet with multiple tails that this
is related. [http://www.nasa.gov/press/2013/november/nasas-hubble-sees-
as...](http://www.nasa.gov/press/2013/november/nasas-hubble-sees-asteroid-
spouting-six-comet-like-tails/)

Though the record of sun sunspots is not a long record and with that this
could very well be normal only outside the sample range we currently have and
goes against all patterns currently cleaned.

Also in a probably unrelated pattern, the northern hemisphere had fewer
hurricanes than normal this season.

One aspect that does add to my curiosity is that the northern pole has moved
and the southern one has not, I was unaware that magnetic poles moved
independantly - though no mention of monopoles. So I'm somewhat curious too
this and hopefully somebody will enlighten.

~~~
memracom
And along with "fewer than normal" the northern hemisphere also had the most
powerful hurricane ever known "Haiyan".

~~~
yread
It's not the "most powerful hurricane ever known", it's ~30th in pressure
since 50s, it only had the highest speed at landfall due to a conversion error

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DustinCalim
I'm sorry but roughly 200 years of data is not nearly enough to begin to
predict any sort of cycles the 4.5 billion year old Sun has.

The article mentions 11 year cycles between polar changes... since it hasn't
happened this year, this article is based around 19 data points... That's the
last 19 data points of the available 409,090,909 11-year increments...

~~~
phaemon
Science doesn't work like that. We've only observed a tiny proportion of the
Moon's orbits around the Earth, but we can still predict an eclipse of the Sun
and we know that it's not going to crash into the Earth tomorrow.

Why not learn a bit about the subject? Stars really are fascinating!

~~~
300bps
I think your example is not a good one and the premise you meant to have it
support is flawed.

Calculating the orbit of an object in space is well understood and several
orders of magnitude less complicated than the relatively poorly understood
processes that occur in the sun.

As the person you replied to said, it is hubris to think that after a few
hundred years of studying a 4 billion year old dynamic object that we can make
such precise predictions about it. The fact that scientists seem to be baffled
by the sun's current behavior should make this point obvious.

~~~
mhurron
> The fact that scientists seem to be baffled

You might be reading more into science reporting than you should. 'Hm, that's
odd' is reported as 'baffled'.

People that actually work in the field do not believe they know it all as you
suggest.

~~~
300bps
I think you may have missed my point. The comment I was replying to
essentially said, "If we can predict A with little information then we can
predict B with little information". My point was that this is not necessarily
true and certainly not true in this instance. After all, scientists are
frequently wrong about sunspot activity predictions and rarely wrong about
where the moon will be at any particular time of the day / year.

The comment I responded to also had a needlessly condescending tone to the OP
of "Science doesn't work like that...Why not learn a bit about the subject?"
which I also objected to.

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aashaykumar92
Given the tools we have to detect the sun's 'doings' today are magnanimously
more sophisticated than 200 years ago, could it be that 200 years ago several
fluctuations were missed because the overall balance still remained throughout
the cycles?

~~~
ced
If I remember correctly, the sunspot record is fairly accurate since we've had
telescopes (~400 years ago), since they can last several months, and there
aren't that many of them.

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pocketstar
>"Sunspots—often broader in diameter than Earth—mark areas of intense magnetic
force that brew disruptive solar storms." >"...diameter than Earth..."
Diameter larger than earth? Did they stop editing the wall street journal?

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csense
Since most of our GPS and cellular devices have been developed and deployed
during a period of unusually weak solar electromagnetic activity, I've been
wondering and worrying about how big of a disaster is waiting to happen when
the sun returns to "normal."

~~~
sliverstorm
Even if GPS stopped working, given some time we could work around it. There'd
be some issues in the short term, but GPS is used because it is easier than
inertial navigation systems, (thankfully) not because it's the only choice.

~~~
InclinedPlane
It's not just easier, GPS is vastly more reliable and accurate than almost any
other method of navigation.

So much so that it's starting to be relied on in many industries. For example,
airplanes are starting to move away from a radar based method of air traffic
control to a GPS based system. Every airplane will simply continuously
transmit its GPS coordinates as part of its transponder message. From this you
can create a highly accurate map of where every plane is, except much more
accurate than with radar.

~~~
sliverstorm
Thanks, radar air traffic control is another good example. The world would not
end without GPS, it would just make things harder :)

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dreid3
Ho-ly shit, the comments. It's almost like it was linked from Drudge or Fox
News.

~~~
jlgreco
From the comments: _" No mention of the four comets currently in the Solar
System. I'm no genius, but don't you think four electromagnetic balls of
energy might have an effect on the Sun's magnetic field."_

(In case anyone here isn't aware, comets are basically big balls of ice, not
_" electromagnetic balls of energy"_)

This comment makes me think that there is remaining ground to be covered in
the "online commenting" field. Youtube comments, for all they are made fun of,
do a decent job of allowing video authors to respond to particularly inane or
confused comments and provide clarification. Those comments are typically then
stuck to the top of the comment section, allowing other commenters to see the
correction.

Perhaps a commenting system that allows scientific educators of various sorts
to single out comments and write highly visible responses to them could 1)
improve the state of online commenting, 2) increase scientific literacy among
the general public.

~~~
anigbrowl
I used to think newspaper comment systems were going to create more informed
citizenry and that everyone would engage in Adult Discussions of Serious
Issues. I tirelessly evangelized the gospel of reader participation at every
opportunity.

I was catastrophically wrong. Most people are idiots, and idiots like to
travel in packs. Sorry about that.

~~~
alex_doom
Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory

