Here’s some “inconvenient” news. According to a new theory proposed by renowned astrophysicist Robert Ehrlich of George Mason University, Ice ages are not caused by planet Earth’s orbital variations as once thought, but by a “dimmer switch” inside the sun that causes its brightness to rise and fall on timescales of around 100,000 years which is exactly the same period as between ice ages on Earth,
Ehrlich modeled the effect of temperature fluctuations in the sun’s interior and showed that while the temperature of the sun’s core is held constant by the opposing pressures of gravity and nuclear fusion, slight variations are possible.
His research builds upon the work of solar physicists Attila Grandpierre and Gábor ÿgoston who calculated that magnetic fields in the sun’s core could produce small instabilities in the solar plasma inducing localized oscillations in temperature.
In an article appearing in the journal New Scientist, Ehrlich describes how some of these oscillations reinforce one another and become long lasting temperature variations, with the sun’s core temperature to oscillating around its average temperature of 13.6 million kelvin in cycles lasting either 100,000 or 41,000 years.
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