

An unusual linkage between solar flares and radioactive elements on Earth - anonymouslambda
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/august/sun-082310.html

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gjm11
I loved this: "What we're suggesting is that something that doesn't really
interact with anything is changing something that can't be changed."

(The proposal is that neutrinos emitted from the sun are responsible for small
changes in radioactive decay rates.)

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mikeknoop
"Going back to take another look at the decay data from the Brookhaven lab,
the researchers found a recurring pattern of 33 days. It was a bit of a
surprise, given that most solar observations show a pattern of about 28 days –
the rotation rate of the surface of the sun.

The explanation? The core of the sun – where nuclear reactions produce
neutrinos – apparently spins more slowly than the surface we see."

This sounds a lot like they are trying to fit an explanation to their data.
Surely they would need some sort of secondary evidence for this kind of
conclusion -- especially considering the topic at hand is brand new and
unexplored.

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sp332
Same here - breaking the rotational momentum of the Sun is not the simplest
explanation that comes to mind :-)

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aphyr
The sun is a big ball of plasma, not a solid object. It's got currents and
layers doing all sorts of interesting things--and what you see on the surface
doesn't necessarily tell you what's going on below.

[edit]: I don't know much about stellar physics. See reply.

~~~
sp332
I am not aware of any model of star formation that might leave the outside of
a star rotating faster than the inside. And helioseismology suggests that our
Sun's core rotates 3-5x faster than the equator.
<http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/316/5831/1591>

~~~
aphyr
I'll have to defer to your expertise! I've got very little experience with
stars. Do you suppose that if the core is rotating faster than the surface, a
slower periodicity could be obtained by a beating interaction between the
different angular frequencies?

Actually, we can already measure stellar neutrinos... I wonder if we've
already observed this hypothetical 33 day period.

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acqq
See comments from sp332 on <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629961>

"It's exactly the sort of thing RATE (<http://www.icr.org/rate/>) has been
talking about. The main point of the RATE project is to discredit the
radioisotope dating methods. Sometimes they just send samples from the same
rock formation to different labs and get different results. But they also
spend a lot of time finding reasons that radioisotope decay rates might change
over time.

This is all from what I remember from a conversation I had with someone
involved with the project about 10 years ago. They got a lot of funding and a
lot of interest back in the late 90's when they were just starting. I thought
some of their research was interesting, but there was so much propaganda mixed
in that it turned my stomach, so I stopped following it."

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samatman
<placeholder for incorrect assertion about radioactive decay and atomic
clocks>

This is what I get for hitting HN before caffeine...

~~~
aphyr
Say what? Atomic clocks are based on hyperfine transitions--electrons jumping
between energy levels. That's an entirely different process than beta decay,
which _does_ involve neutrinos.

