I think there is a more interesting (and longer scale) trend that is less talked about, that the last couple solar cycles have been overall less intense (less activity/spots at the maximums)-
http://solen.info/solar/images/comparison_recent_cycles.png
I wish that chart went further back to see if there is a greater cycle at play. At a glance it looks like this cycle is a slight rebound over the last.
Can one use Sun's magnetic field for navigation? I imagine Sun compass would be far more precise than Earth compass, no?
You want something to make it easier to find the sun?
Anyway the sun's magnetic fields is ridiculously weak on earth.
Well, one always has to consider the first manned expedition to the Sun and how they'll navigate.
Telling time of day would be the first problem as it's always high noon. And star sightings might prove challenging, at least at optical frequencies.
(Am now thinking of an SF story set on the Sun in which navigation and timekeeping play critical roles....)
In that SF story, I would be far more interested in the tech, that allows human life (or anything we bring) to withstand that slightly bigger problem called heat and radiation.
Pshaw! Trifling details.
(Focusing on the non-obvious problems might make for a more interesting and/or fantastical story.)
Ah, a energy force field it is then.
Old reliable.
Turtles all the way down.
Teenage, mutant, ninja, or otherwise.
Hello darkness my old friend
And gravity.
Telling time of day would be the first problem as it's always high noon.
If the sun is always directly down from the surface, doesn't that make it solar midnight from anywhere on the surface?
A fair argument.
I'm playing with slight variations of this prompt on GPTs:
"Write a short (300--600 word) story about how human explorers on the Sun would address the challenges of navigation, orientation, and timekeeping (including the challenges of starfinding). Ignore obvious effects such as heat, gravity, and radiation."
Results are ... not excellent literature, but amusing all the same.
Why, yes. It's really hard to find sun in fog, which is frequent at sea. And you really want it's location to be precise for navigation.
The Vikings supposedly had a "sunstone" (cordierite crystal) that could help find the Sun through clouds or fog. I did buy a piece and wasn't able to get any good results, but my life didn't depend on it.
By what mechanism was this intended to work? Any known fields would surely have stronger local effects outside of direct sunlight...
It’s a polarizing filter. The atmosphere polarizes sunlight based on the angle the light enters. You can find the position of the sun above the horizon as the point where light is least horizontally polarized (a horizontal filter has the least difference between brightness through the filter and around it), and potentially find the position of the sun itself by the highest rate of change of polarization angle. This works remarkably well even on overcast days — try it with polarized sunglasses.
I am thinking of a Sun compass a signal of which could be used in space. Can this signal be fused into IMU? I wonder if it makes any sense.
Interestingly this happens every 11 years and also their is a longer cycle called the Hale cycle which is double the length at 22 years. It flips from a mostly dipole where the poles match the orientation of earth to a reverse and much more irregular magenetic orientation. I didn't see anything about how this really affects Earth directly other than what I knew previously about sun spots make Coronal Mass Ejections sometimes towards Earth. Think we had a few things happen recently due to those but nothing too crazy.
Is it related to the 11 year sunspot cycle or just a coincidence?
For layman explanation it was just discussed it on StarTalk just a few days ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lty_55JbkmE
Why NDT brought that idiotic, irritating comic on the show? That clown in unbearable.
The point of the show is to bring science to common people. Many of the startalk episodes he brings on pop culture icons or sports commentators. They dumb down the content substantially, but my mom and my grandma really liked those types of episodes so it must work.
Depends who you ask. To me, NDT is unbearable too...
Directly related
Mostly affects cloud formation [1]
1. https://home.web.cern.ch/news/news/physics/cloud-discovers-n...
Without affecting weather patterns?
You might want to find a better link.
That specific article, while interesting, doesn't mention the sun's magnetic field once.
Nor the sun, nor magnetic fields.
Thank you so much. I came to the comments looking for a similar explanation.
My understanding is that the Hale cycle is just a complete "360° flip" of 2 "180° flips". I.e. the 11 year cycle is essentially going from "mostly dipole" (but say with north magnetic direction going one way) to irregular and then back to mostly dipole, but this time with magnetic north pointing in the opposite direction. The next 11 year cycle gets magnetic north pointing back "up" again.
(it's gradual and takes five years, not like a day)
But that doesn't earn you a lot of clicks...
In a cosmic timescale, it's practically instant.
On a solar scale though earth goes through a full orbit in just a year, Mars two years.
It is interesting that Jupiter has an 11 year orbit and that kind of matches the flip, might just be coincidence but that mass has a huge tug though. Sun is only 1000 times the mass of Jupiter, if you think of it like a "failed star" it's kinda like a pseudo binary? Eh I am grasping at straws.
If Jupiter was a failed star, it failed big time.
"Although Jupiter would need to be about 75 times more massive to fuse hydrogen and become a star,[66] its diameter is sufficient as the smallest red dwarf may be only slightly larger in radius than Saturn."
It got as big as it could be, though.
"Theoretical models indicate that if Jupiter had over 40% more mass, the interior would be so compressed that its volume would decrease despite the increasing amount of matter. For smaller changes in its mass, the radius would not change appreciably.[63] As a result, Jupiter is thought to have about as large a diameter as a planet of its composition and evolutionary history can achieve.[64] The process of further shrinkage with increasing mass would continue until appreciable stellar ignition was achieved"
I think the point is that it's pretty darn close to the very fuzzy limit of when something can be a star vs. when it can't. If it were off in space on its own, rather than orbiting our star, it might be a contentious classification
No - the definition of a star isn't fuzzy at all. It's defined by hydrogen fusion - if it's doing that (or did in the past), it's a star, or if it isn't then it's not. Jupiter fails this by a factor of 75.
Brown dwarfs (which fuse deuterium but not regular hydrogen, starting at about 13x Jupiter's mass) were thought to be in a fuzzy area, but then their own category was created for them.
Thankfully I didn’t say “what a star is” was the fuzzy thing! :)
Yeah but if it flips every 11 years and takes 5 years to flip that's got a little less of the "about to flip" flavor to it.
If you're open to exiting an novel theories on why this happens, check out Dr. Robitaille liquid sun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUZ0Obpihbc
Very interesting hypothesis. Anyone here with more expertise want to comment?
The summary is that the sun is actually metallic hydrogen, which forms a lattice similar to layers of graphite. This both explains the black-body radiation of the sun and provides a mechanism to explain sunspots and the solar maximum and pole flip: sunspots are non-hydrogen elements that are excluded from the metallic hydrogen lattice and push it upwards as they migrate to the surface and are ejected.
He's a retired radiologist who knows nothing about astrophysics.
Einstein.
metallic hydrogen, which forms a lattice
Metal hydrogen is a liquid though, it doesn’t form a crystalline structure like an actual metal.
Solar ejecta are almost completely composed of hydrogen. Just like any other part of the Sun's outer layers.
And God! What a convoluted theory full of ideas nobody can test.
I am not an expert but boy does that feel right based on the available evidence that I’ve seen.
I was just about to suggest the same thing.
Here's a related Veritasium episode: "The Bizarre Behavior of Rotating Bodies"
So going off of the previous HN thread, I thought we were due for a Carrington event a month ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40321821). Will this next bout of astronomical magnetic phenomena pose a threat to technological civilization as we know it?
Perhaps. The Carrington event was 2-4 times as strong as the one last month, but on the other hand it also looks like most of the electrical systems are a lot more resilient than they used to be.
When we had the CME headed towards Earth recently, I was pretty amazed at the sheer number of highly-upvoted HN comments whose authors seemed to believe that the power grid, copper phone lines, and communications satellites were all about to be wiped out.
Fortunately, most engineers in all of the fields above are well aware of the Carrington Event. And while it's not beyond possibility that there might be some corner cases if (when?) another one happens, we know how to design these systems to keep another one from causing any major outages or damage.
In fairness, quite a lot of governments are visibly very bad at getting quality infrastructure built, themselves or privately, especially infrastructure that only matters after they left office.
The visibility may be unrepresentative, newspapers always amplify what's bad rather than what's good.
I am curious about how would the general public be made aware of another Carrington-class storm. NOAA rated May 2024 storm as G5, which is the highest rating for a geomagnetic storm regarding its effect on the public.
Just need Bruckheimer + Bay and/or Emmerich to make a couple of disaster movies about the concept to incept it into the public's mind. Hopefully that will then provide NOAA the popular support to do what they need to do.
So... What's the range and how do we modulate it?
The range would be awesome, but the city took pretty significant offense to my plan to setup a 11 lightyear dipole antenna on my property.
It's a hard life being an amateur radio operator these days...
Hopefully you hadn't bought the metal for it yet, 208 cubic kilometres isn't easy to store.
and that one word a century baud rate is a bit of a downer.
Which made me think. I would expect other stars to do this. Would magnetic polarity be detectable at interstellar distances? could novel astronomy* be done on stars this way?
* Does the magnetic flip period tell us anything about the star that would otherwise be hard to figure out.
One side effect of the magnetic field shift is slight but primarily beneficial: It can help shield Earth from galactic cosmic rays — high-energy subatomic particles that travel at near light speed and can damage spacecraft and harm orbiting astronauts who are outside Earth's protective atmosphere.
Buried three sentences from the end of the article, after a wall of ads and filler (I'm impatient).
Why? Is it because the poles are aligned with earths, complimenting our own magnetic field?
It appears the magnetic poles are in continuous rotation [1], that sometimes aligns to the rotational poles and sometimes doesn't, with a "flip" event being the binary classification from the slow and smooth traversal over the equator. I feel silly, but I always assumed it was from some more fairly sharp step in the rate of change!
There is an animation further down that shows the magnetic field generated by the sun when it is a dipole. Apparently the 3-d wave like pattern better shields from cosmic rays originating outside the solar system.
... interesting question though..
Is this related to why my part of the US has had UV notices lately?
Thanks
Its so perplexing to me how the laws of physics replicates simple properties into massive scales.
so then i wonder why do people struggle with the impact of polar shifts on climate?
What makes you think that people do struggle?
Are you hinting at the sun's poles or the earth's? Further do you mean the rotational pole, or the magnetic poles?
FWiW, NASA has written on all of these, for example:
Why Variations in Earth’s Magnetic Field Aren’t Causing Today’s Climate Change
https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/earth-science/flip...
That makes all of us.
I'm having trouble parsing tfa; does this mean the sun is at "solar maximum" now, and does this also mean we may be in for some more frequent and intense auroras?
You can see the sunspot cycle progression here, looks like solar maximum will last a year or two:
We know so much and yet so little. The writing is in the article stating how mathematically they have no model, therefore they cannot truly understand it yet (researchers/academics).
This is true for climate change and it's own challenges along with many other applications of similar nature where models are incomplete or entirely missing large portions of data needed to further true understanding of a given process.
As is common in physics, a subject can be extremely well studied, theories can be produced, models can be created that predict future behaviour incredibly precisely, but because we can’t poke it hard enough or with enough precision the exact underlying mechanism remains unconfirmed.
The sentiment captures the essence of the human pursuit of knowledge...
The earth too it seem, but on a longer timeframe.
Does someone here know more about this?
As the sea floor plates that are being created in the mid ocean ridges cool the magnetic orientation is recorded in the alignment of particles in the newly frozen rock.
We can see alternating bands of polarity in the rock that show what the orientation was over geological time. The bands that spread outward from the ridges are separated by millions of years and provide a clear picture of sea floor spreading, and continental drift.
Earth's magnetic field rotates in irregular intervals. The terrifying part is, the time it takes to complete the rotation, the different intermediate magnetic poles cancel each other out, and we are left with a much smaller magnetic field overall. As low as 10% of what earth has today.
Astrum's channel on youtube has several pictures and complete analysis[1]. (I have downloaded the whole channel on my computer, that's the filename.)
[1] How The Earth Got Its Magnetic Field (And Why It Might Not Protect Us Much Longer)
It's just really sad to see all in the storys about the ends of earth. Every thing a new day to kill us. Now were to be wiped out enterirely.
It's not a story about the end of the earth.
It's a story about a regular recurring solar phenomenon.
Relax. Humanity has always produced stories about the ends of earth, and we always will.
It's just something we do.
I recall a few years ago a what seemed to be ground-breaking white paper from I think a Russian scientist, who argued (and convincingly) that there are two cycles at work, one deep in the Sun, the other shallow. The co-incidence of these two cycles both being at maximum, or both being at minimum, explaining the extremes of solar activity.
That sounds like Gnevishev, M. N.; Ohl, A. I. (1948). "On the 22-year cycle of solar activity" which first appeared in the Russian journal Astronomicheskii Zhurnal 76 years past.
I wonder what the astrologers have to say about this
The article says the transition takes 2-5 years and happens every 11 years. Isn't the title a clickbait then?
I recall back a few years reading some articles speaking about the sun entering in a Grand Solar Minimum cycle similar to the Maunder minimum, and that the result could be global cooling, etc.
Not sure if there's been additional research or conjecture since then.
I'm convinced in a few hundred/thousand years scientists are going to be urging politicians to figure out how to pump more CO2 into the atmosphere due to cooling from cyclic perturbations of Earth's orbit. Too bad I won't be around to enjoy the irony.
or we will learn those studies were by the same caliber of people who did the food pyramid etc
The food pyramid is misunderstood
'those scientists' were from Sweden responding to protests over the increasing costs of food due to famine. When looked at from the lens of maximizing calories per dollar, it makes a lot more sense.
it could have been divine revelation. what matters is that it is used to this day for policy.
Which is not what you said originally, when you disparaged those who created the food pyramid,
In what way do you think the food pyramid is used today for policy? It's been known to be incorrect and not used for quite a while ...
Makes sense. In a similar vein, once fast food places started stating calories per item... It actually helped me maximize calories per dollar and eat more calories, which seems opposite of the original goal of helping people limit their calories. Who is going to fast food to keep calories low?
I'd guess that there are more people use that information to select lower calorie food than people who make their menu selections based on the maximum number of calories per dollar, although I'd bet both those groups are a tiny fraction compared to the number of people who just order whatever they're in the mood for/tastes best to them and knowing how many calories are in that meal doesn't influence their behavior/choices at that moment but may still inform their choices later on
Regardless of the cause of climate change, on any time scale (even if it is a 100% natural cycle and human effects are zilch in the grand scheme), pollution is icky and hey, I'm walking^W living over here.
With respect, 2/3 of the carbon dioxide out there is purely natural such that “icky” isn’t an appropriate foundation for the relevant public policy
With respect, they said pollution is the icky part. I’m not aware of any major industries that are responsible for an appreciable amount of CO2 emissions and no other pollutants/icky stuff, but I’d love to be proven wrong about that.
I don't think it would be any more ironic than a house using the heater in the winter and ac in the summer
Also, acidification is another problem of co2. Honestly you might rather release methane or refrigerant if your goal was only to heat/insulate the atmosphere with minimal changes to chemistry, but I'm not a chemist etc
Also never forget the great oxygenation event and the azola cooling the planet to the point of mass extinction and snowball earth
Fair enough.
uhmm.. if we have to do that, we'll do it.. i don't see what's ironic about that.
Is it ironic? Right now it's getting too hot so we want fewer greenhouse gasses, in the future it might be cold and we want more. I think it's less ironic and more just the intentional infant science of planet-scale climate engineering
Given the orbital perturbations are on timescales of hundreds of thousands of years, no.
(That said, if we make it past the next century, we're probably going to be disassembling entire planets with von Neumann replicators rather than concerning ourselves with something as small as a mere atmosphere).
The theory is that we're due for another ice age and that there's going to be a pole shift. Pumping CO2 into the atmosphere would then be the best thing to do to stave off this scenario.
which makes for a very convenient distraction/talking point of climate-focused science deniers. I am no expert, but every time I have checked into one of those supposed impending Grand Solar Minimum predictions (that will cause some sort of climate crisis), it has been pure pseudo-science with no legitimate or rational theoretical basis.
Don't shoot the messenger. It's all theory and conjecture until it actually happens, and it has in the past, and it WILL happen again in the future.
It is important not to conflate "I have a hunch that x will happen" with "theoretically motivated predictions".
Also, you are conflating a mild temperature drop that would be expected to be caused by solar minimum with an ice age and a "pole shift".
An Ice Age doesn't lead to "mild" temperature drops. It's catastrophically cold for centuries. Civilization is unlikely to survive it, and we don't have records of any that have save the Neanderthals, who lived in small groups.
We're in an ice age now. Humans have always lived in an Ice Age. It's called the Quaternary glaciation and it's been filled with individual glacial periods.
You might want to read up on terminology.
Physics, thermodynamics, informs us that the glaciers aren't coming back while the insulation in the atmosphere is high and still increasing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation
That's pedantic.
Meh. The running hypothesis on the "other side" is that we're going to have a pole shift and grand solar minimum at the same time. Now, as you can see, I haven't really done the prerequisite reading. I have, however, read about all the stupidity surrounding "global warming" and how it was totally going to end the planet in 2000 and 1980 and 2024 and whenever, every year's the last one so that people that don't have anyone's best interests at heart can get more leverage off this supposedly inevitable-and-totally-close scenario. Meanwhile, the "fringe" has decidedly stuck to one thing, and has repeatedly criticized the very real corruption of (climate) science by monetary interests (and now national / global policy decisions) and popular opinion. This only makes me NOT want to spend my free time untangling "conclusive" climate decisions backed by ""science"" and who-knows-what leverage by a slimy bureaucrat.
I, as an individual, don't have a horse in this race. I don't believe in either one because my carbon emissions can be eclipsed by a volcano or a plane in a few hours. It's completely useless to expect me to not buy a car or to watch my energy consumption when it's not going to make a dent anyway.
It's no hunch and the author didn't express it as such.
It's a well established theory
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
Those ~100k year cycles in earth orbit and spin are not related to the present discussion of sunspot cycles and solar activity.
And (while not clear in this case) usually when someone claims that a "pole shift" will happen, they are usually referring to the crackpot claim that the planet will suddenly do something like maybe flip over or wobble violently causing the end of civilization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataclysmic_pole_shift_hypothe...
Well if that were true it would be the opposite of inconvenient. It would be like a truth that’s, I dunno, what’s a good word for something that isn’t inconvenient?
Inevitable; irrelevant to the fact of your existence.
Denialism.
From what I understand, according to the best estimates this is already happening and we should have seen global cooling for a long time now if it wasn’t for greenhouse gas emissions
.. which means that the level of emissions we have right now is far, far beyond what’s necessary for avoiding global cooling.
This should be obvious if you look at best estimates of the rate of cooling/warming in the past. The warming we see now is happening much faster than anything seen before so it’s absolutely not a good thing in any conceivable way
How about we don’t do that? And if it indeed starts getting cold, we regroup?
There is a chart of all observed cycles on the same website.
http://www.solen.info/solar/cycles1_to_present.html