Living Inside The Sun pt.2 – Knowing
For What It’s Worth – 100 Hours of Astronomy
April 9, 2009Kartini Day
April 21, 2009
Last week-end, i watched the blockbuster movie ‘Knowing’. I would not make any opinion about the movie, nevertheless, a blockbuster indeed, and forget about the scientific underlying fact, it’s a movie anyway! But, what i want to point out from the movie is, that movie depicted how the fate of Earth depend on the situation of the Sun. ‘Whatever happened to the Sun, it will affect the earth nonetheless’. This premise is hold true in the real situation.
Like a living being, the Sun has the dynamic, known as the Solar cycle. How do we know? The simplest explanation came from the observation. Since Galileo used the telescope to observe the sky, people started to aware, that there are patches in the Sun, known as the sunspot. In the mid-1800s, Heinrich Schwabe discovered that there is a pattern of the appearance of the sunspot, and then we know now about the pattern as the natural sunspot cycle, and further established as Solar Cycle. What is that patches anyway? Sunspots are islands of magnetism on the ‘surface’ of the Sun, and the source of all Sun activities, and the size might be as large as planet-sized, always changing, appear to largest and finally disappear. The usual pattern of the sunspot is every 11 years or so.
According to natural pattern of 11 years, we should be in the 24 cycle of the Solar cycle, do we? Or do we in Solar minimum instead?
Sunspot Prediction for Cycle 24 (from: NASA headline News)
But, as always, nature always keep the secret that always challenge us to uncover whatever the mistery behind. what is that? To answer that, yes we already in the cycle 24, or we still in the cycle 23? It is not like guessing a card game. Look on this picture. This figurative ‘piano plot’ tells a story about how various scientists tried to predict the ‘exact maximum’ of the cycle 24.
The Piano Plot: The abscissa describe the various research, with the underlying model desribed in the color, while ordinate described the predicted annual-averaged sunspot number for solar cycle 24.
How many predictions are there? So many, (for further, one can read full detail from: Pesnell (2008), SolPhys, 252, 1, 209-220). Even the ‘Consensus Statement of The Solar Cycle 24 Prediction Panel‘ agreed that there are two possibilities of the occurence:
The panel agrees solar maximum will occur near October, 2011 for the large cycle (Ri=140) case and August, 2012 for the small cycle (Ri=90) prediction. (March 20, 2007)
As long as no full understanding of underlying physics of the sunspot cycle, all the predictions are open to discussion. And that is how the scientific work goes, to explore all the uncertainty & the unknown. And as today, this is the 25 days of 2009 without the spot in the Sun.
Back to my preliminary premise, ‘whatever happened to the Sun, it will affect the earth’. We might never know what will happen next, will the cycle 24 begin soon, or we go into the more and more quiet Sun instead? We always try to have the answers, and that should be testable. This is always about experience and reality and the scientific perspective to elaborate the two.
So, we already in April, ‘usually’ we should be on hot season, but until today, we still have a cloudy day, and still rain on daily bases, do the local weather & the Sun correlated? When will the rain season ended? That would be my homework.
3 Comments
Climate is changing and always will. The climate celebrities, however, are linking climate and the economy. Yes, there has been warming to end the Pleistocene. Climate is a multiple input, multiple loop, multiple output, complex system. The facts and the hypotheses, however, do not support CO2 as a serious ‘pollutant’. In fact, it is plant fertilizer and seriously important to all life on the planet. It is the red herring used to unwind our economy. That issue makes the science relevant.
Sulphate from volcanoes can have a catastrophic effect. But water vapour is far more important. Water vapour (0.4% overall by volume in air, but 1 – 4 % near the surface) is the most effective green house gas followed by methane (0.0001745%). The third ranking greenhouse gas is CO2 (0.0383%), and it does not correlate well with global warming or cooling either; in fact, CO2 in the atmosphere trails warming which is clear natural evidence for its well-studied inverse solubility in water: CO2 dissolves rapidly in cold water and bubbles rapidly out of warm water. The equilibrium in seawater is very high; making seawater a great ‘sink’; CO2 is 34 times more soluble in water than air is soluble in water.
CO2 has been rising and Earth and her oceans have been warming. However, the correlation trails. Correlation, moreover, is not causation. The causation is under experimental review, however, and while the radiation from the sun varies only in the fourth decimal place, the magnetism is awesome.
“Using a box of air in a Copenhagen lab, physicists traced the growth of clusters of molecules of the kind that build cloud condensation nuclei. These are specks of sulphuric acid on which cloud droplets form. High-energy particles driven through the laboratory ceiling by exploded stars far away in the Galaxy – the cosmic rays – liberate electrons in the air, which help the molecular clusters to form much faster than climate scientists have modeled in the atmosphere. That may explain the link between cosmic rays, cloudiness and climate change.”
As I understand it, the hypothesis of the Danish National Space Center goes as follows:
Quiet sun → reduced magnetic and thermal flux = reduced solar wind → geomagnetic shield drops → galactic cosmic ray flux → more low-level clouds and more snow → more albedo effect (more heat reflected) → colder climate
Active sun → enhanced magnetic and thermal flux = solar wind → geomagnetic shield response → less low-level clouds → less albedo (less heat reflected) → warmer climate
That is how the bulk of climate change might work, coupled with (modulated by) sunspot peak frequency there are cycles of global warming and cooling like waves in the ocean. When the waves are closely spaced, the planets warm; when the waves are spaced farther apart, the planets cool.
The ultimate cause of the solar magnetic cycle may be cyclicity in the Sun-Jupiter centre of gravity. We await more on that.
Although the post 60s warming period appears to be over, it has allowed the principal green house gas, water vapour, to kick in with more humidity, clouds, rain and snow depending on where you live to provide the negative feedback that scientists use to explain the existence of complex life on Earth for 550 million years. Ancient sedimentary rocks and paleontological evidence indicate the planet has had abundant liquid water over the entire span. The planet heats and cools naturally and our gasses are the thermostat.
Check the web site of the Danish National Space Center.
http://www.space.dtu.dk/English/Research/Research_divisions/Sun_Climate/Experiments_SC/SKY.aspx
Keeping in mind that windmills are hazardous to birds, be wary of the unintended consequences of believing and contributing to the all-knowing environmental lobby groups.
I’m definately more educated now after having read all this ‘sun’ information. Thanks.
The movie ‘knowing’ was also quite entertaining, with some awesome and scary special effects.
There is a correlation between minimum length and maximum height which makes it pretty unlikely already that the next maximum will be on the big end: Given the continuing low in sunspot numbers, the next maximum should be of average size at best. And w.r.t. to the first commenter: Sorry, but the Danish speculations have been proven wrong and are being kept alive mainly in the popular press, I’m afraid …