From SIDC (Solar Influences Data analysis Center): http://sidc.oma.be/products/quieta/
START OF ALL QUIET ALERT ………………….. The SIDC – RWC
Belgium expects quiet Space Weather conditions for the next 48 hours or until further notice. This implies that: * the solar X-ray output is expected to remain below C-class level, * the K_p index is expected to remain below 5, * the high-energy proton fluxes are expected to remain below the event threshold.
They should have also added…”Have a nice weekend!”
The monthly sunspot numbers are low, really low:
200801 2008.041 3.4 * 4.2 * 200802 2008.123 2.1 * 200803 2008.205 9.3 * 200804 2008.287 2.9 * 200805 2008.372 2.9 * 200806 2008.454 3.1 * 200807 2008.539 0.5 *
And the 10.7CM radio flux is holding below 67.
h/t to Barry Hearn
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the ‘sum’, not the ‘sun’ of the two radii. moderator: fix and remove if not against policy.
Leif,
Thank you very much. I’ll press my luck and ask another. What if the curvature of space the Sun orbits in is not uniform across the diameter of the Sun as it moves through that space? Is this just another way to think of tides?
Thanks for your patience.
statepoet: yes that gives rise to tides. A more ‘classical’ explanation would be that the force between, say Jupiter, and a parcel of the Sun’s atmosphere just ‘under’ Jupiter is larger than between Jupiter and a parcel of the Sun at the center, simply because the former parcel is closer to Jupiter. The reverse is true for a parcel on the ‘anti-Jupiter’ side. The result is a one-half millimeter high tidal bulge on the Sun.
Leif,
Now I’ll risk your wrath. Is it possible that the periodic occurrence of tides might cause a resonance that might amplify their size? Don’t hit me, I’m just curious. (Still, I mustn’t forget what happened to that cat.)
You’ve probably covered this before but I either wasn’t here or not paying attention.
statepoet: this does not happen in the Earth’s oceans and in the Sun there are tides from all the planets at different times. The tide due to Venus is almost as big as that due to Jupiter. So, no, the tides do not add up and up and up…
Furthermore, people have investigated if sunspots occur in concert with these individual tides and found that they do not.
Leif,
If the curvature of the space that the Sun orbits in is not uniform across the Sun’s diameter as the Sun moves through that space wouldn’t the Sun’s movement in its orbit impart a spin to the Sun because one side of the Sun (facing the center of the Sun’s orbit) would be traveling in a more warped space than the opposite side?
Thanks for indulging my idle curiosity.
Oops, I posted before I checked to see if you replied. OK, so much for tidal resonance. This is so much fun for me. May God bless you.
Leif,
actually, I should have just said “a differently warped space” instead of “a more warped space”.
Leif,
That muddled paragraph was actually intentional, I was outlining an easy to understand parallel between a magnetic field line and a barycenter. If someone understands why a magnetic field line does not exist in reality, the parallel is obvious.
If you can teach someone that a barycenter is a mental construct, it is a simple matter to show why there is no effect.
Since the barycenter issue keeps popping up, I’d recommend refining your reply to my comments to teach someone who has a limitted understanding of science. Then you can simply paste it (or link to it) as a reply when some says, “Barycenter effect!”
Best wishes
Raphael
Raphael: The puzzling question is why the barycenter comes up all the time? Where do people get this [non-obvious – with a difficult word even] idea from? Maybe it is one of Richard Dawkins’ memes that somehow has strong survival skill.
Leif,
I have said nothing about them barywhatevers. I just trying to get a grip on the implications of warped space.
I looked within my heart
and saw that it was dark.
“Methinks I am a fright;
myself I cannot fight!”
And then I saw a light.
Lief (cc: Robert Wood):
> I took the whole quote to be understood, so no cleverness.
My bad.
What of Hathaway’s predictions for SC #25? Does this help us understand the longer-term magnitude of change in overall solar behavior?
We’ve touched on this before. I understand your view on the conveyor theory (vs. percolation in the superadiabatic plasma (and my poor layman’s brain just about burst, but I soldiered on…), but there is some kind of poleward motion, and it has slowed.
Can the observation of slowed sunspot groups be explained via the percolation/magnetic model? That is, if the overall conveyor theory were wrong could it only be because the convective layer isn’t structured quite as described? What else would drive the poleward motion (both speed & direction)?
Or would inter-model ecumenicalism be too far back in the rear pews of either sect? 🙂
IAC, this’ll be my last post for a time, we’re relocating across the USA, but not first without rambling about the continent in our motor home.
Lief, it’s been very enjoyable discussing the sun & Earth with you! I’ll check in to see if you have a chance to reply. You’re a great sport for putting up with so many hopelessly earnest but horribly naive questions. You deserve the Fred Rogers prize for equanimity and feigned aplomb or something! — Lee
As an outside physicist observer, i.e. not at all related to solar and astronomy, I would like to add my two lepta of the euro.
1) Of course Leif is right and the barycenter is a mathematical construct created for convenience of calculations.
2) The tides in planetary systems are correlated with the motion of the barycenter. Take the earth moon system, where the barycenter is on the line connecting to the moon and you can see the correlation.
I have not done the calculations but accept that the tides due to Jupiter etc on the sun are of the order of a millimeter.
On the other hand, the calculations of the tide on earth from the moon give something around 37 cm. Everybody knows though that there are tides in the sea that can be ten meter high. Why and how? the floor of the ocean and the funneling and the turbulence that is created combine to amplify by more than ten times the effect.
Thus I would not exclude the possibility of such amplifications in the flows of plasma and what nots that the sun is composed of, if the “surfaces”/interfaces” are not uniform and smooth , which they are not as the sunspots and other outcroppings show.
In addition I would keep an open mind because gravity is much stronger on the sun, and a mm tide on earth carries much less energy than a mm tide on the sun.
I am not saying that it must be so. I am saying that we should have an open mind that a sun model may come up that might explain correlations that some people see in the data and the motion of the sun about the barycenter. ( which is the reason barycenters come up again and again. Correlations are sexy)
And then again it might not be possible to create such a model.
leebert: On Earth, the meridional circulation is driven by the temperature difference between equator and pole, same on the Sun. A slight variation [a few degrees] of temperature is all that is needed. Now, what drives the temperature difference? We still have a lot to learn. So your questions don’t have easy answers.
anna: “a mm tide on earth carries much less energy than a mm tide on the sun“, but on the Sun, that energy is spread over a vastly greater mass and volume, to the energy density is much less. Because the Sun has a deep convection zone, the outer layers are is well mixed [‘boiling pot’], so ‘structure’ is hard to come by. “Open mind” can be driven too far. As a heckler once shouted at a conference where the speaker extolled the virtue of an open mind: “but not so open that your brain falls out!”.
Anna V.
My take on this is that any marginal tidal effect would have such a minuscule effect were the sun only a gas giant (with plenty of internal turbulence). But the sun is far larger and with energy levels and turbulence so immense I think the case becomes even weaker.
This might be a chicken & egg quandary. The correlations aren’t quite on, as Lief showed, they’re offset a bit. If they’re offset, but consistently offset, it could suggest a lag effect going either way. That is, the correlation is there, but maybe the sun has driven the pattern to settle into a neatly stable system.
The heliophysicists who study the problem seem to be onto something in understanding the chaotic system. All chaotic systems are prone to cyclic behaviors, so we would expect overlapping phase peaks & troughs as the various subsystems come in and out of phase, resulting in solar weather trends. IOW, can we explain what the sun’s doing without using the dreaded “b” word?
Also, the percolative nature of sun spots seems dramatic enough to us, but in terms of net energy flux, it’s less than a percent. Enough to get our attention here on Earth, but a fart in a hurricane to the sun.
Wouldn’t a lonely star without any planets go through energy cycles? Just a guess, but I’d reckon so.
leebert: “Wouldn’t a lonely star without any planets go through energy cycles? Just a guess, but I’d reckon so”
I think so too. There is just one problem: how do you create such a star? all [low-mass] stars must have planets as they condense out of their circumstellar disk.
“many hopelessly earnest but horribly naive questions.” leebert
OK, I don’t know General Relativity. Just let me pose just one more question?
1) Space is warped by mass, correct?
2) It is very unlikely that space is uniformly warped, also correct?
3) Then how can a body with a significant diameter move through space without experiencing some real or virtual torque on it since opposite sides of the object will be going through differently warped space?
But short of an answer to number 3) can anyone recommend a good primer on General Relativity?
Thanks in advance.
statePoet: there will be effects from the differently warped space, the point is that these effects are very, very small. Like the effect on the truck of an 18-wheeler running over an ant at 100 mph [actually, much smaller]. Google G.R. books and ye shall find. But the effects we are talking about are the same in good ole’ Newtonian Mechanics. In fact, Newton himself explained the tidal phenomenon. No need for G.R. to understand this.
thanks Leif for alerting me to Landscheidt’s not so perfect record of predictions – I will revisit his material where he claims his methodology has proven accurate. I didn’t pick up any references in his papers to astrology – so if he indulged in that art privately, it would be no reason to dismiss his work – Newton was rather fond of the practice too.
So, what now is the take on Gleissberg cycles? Are they not derived from paleontological studies of ice, sediments and the like? They have short and long cycles, rather like the Schwabe and Halle cycles. Are we to consider that anything longer than these two latter is, as Ilya Usoskin seems to be arguing, chaotic phenomena? Chaos may simply be the label for everything that lies outside of our predictive methodology.
Am I the only one beginning to feel distinctly uncomfortable at these last minute data changes – as with carbon dioxide and the sea-ice extent (not to mention James Hansen’s predelections). In my admittedly skimping reviews of other fields, I note that Hansen also held that satellite data showing increased SW radiation fluxes to the surface 1980-2000 – quite enough to drive all the global warming, plus sudden losses of LW to space at about the time the oceans recorded sudden cooling, were all subject to doubt because of calibration issues on the instruments. I could add the same doubts about the ISCCP cloud data showing 4% thinning over the same time period. The expression of doubt by such a senior figure may account for this data being given less than adequate attention by the IPCC.
Yet another instant was the withdrawal, also due to instrument re-calibration of all the oceanographic data that showed a 20% fall in ocean heat content between 2003-2005 – which happened only a few months after publication.
perhaps it is simply that any data that runs counter to expectations receives a lot more scrutiny…..
I have always thought that whatever the Sun and Universe are putting out and beaming to planets should be measured on each planet as well as measured objectively. Each planet comes with its own atmosphere, gravity, and chemical mixes that I believe interact with the Sun. A smooth surface may interact differently. A solid color planet may interact differently. A water planet, gas planet, land planet, far away planet, close planet, all have different ways of responding to the Sun and the Universe.
So I prefer to think about measures of the Sun/Universe “stuff” from here on Earth, through our atmosphere down to about head level, where the temperature makes me freeze or sweat, or makes wheat freeze or grow, or makes tomatoes red or green (or not at all) at the end of the growing season. I know it sounds selfish, but so many rules and regulations are being made based on, or ignorant of, what is out there and how it affects my head and my crops.
Is this an unreasonable view of data? So if the Sun is further away, whatever flux is at that time from our view here on Earth is to me more practicable than what it is from a space craft above our atmosphere.
Its all about me ;>)
Leif,
Thank you. But G.R. is sexy and if i am going to revisit my poorly learned physics then I need all the excitement I can get. Perhaps with the hopefully 60 remaining years of my life and a 40 day fast or two ala Pythagoras, I can digest it.
“Its all about me ;>)” Pam
Of course, only conscious beings are of any consequence since we are the only things capable of suffering. When people speak of “saving the earth” I wish to tell them “The earth doesn’t care whether it is ‘saved’ or not; it is the people and higher animals that are important.” Once, this was obvious knowledge, but these days I am not too sure.
It’s all about you,
but it’s also about me,
and if any others care,
it’s also about ye.
Lief:
(taking a break from packing)
On open minds & relativity.
I have a Buddhist analogy on these things that I wrote for my kids. Experience is a fixed thing, like a cartoon character being drawn going extremely fast through a movie. The Road Runner’s watch slows down relative to the clocks in the movie (Wiley E. Coyote becomes old, dies & turns to dust…) but the Road Runner’s “rate” of experience is the same, just the information around him becomes ever more impermanent.
But what is the experience and what is the information? The movie screen is like Self, with an audience eager to see something happening on it. But we are looking at the wrong thing, the projector is the source of the movie, not the screen. The lamp, well… don’t look to the finger pointing to the moon. 🙂
We can suspend disbelief too much in some ways, but discernment is part of being open to experience. Ego defends self from surrendering experiences.
W. E. Coyote is too full of ego, however & is reborn in his constant clinging to catching the RR who has become relativistic. W.E. Coyote is our paragon of suffering, clinging to impermanence. The RR is the proverbial Buddha being met on the road & poor W.E. Coyote is always trying to kill him.
( I doubt Warner Brothers would approve…. 😉
OK, here’s a little thought experiment I pose to my kids:
How much of the universe can you fit on the head of a pin?
And Is there a difference if the pin head were smaller?
Lief:
Have Darth Competent disintegrate them with his Dearth Sta?