From NASA Science News h/t to John-X
Spotless Sun: 2008 is the Blankest Year of the Space Age
Sept. 30, 2008: Astronomers who count sunspots have announced that 2008 is now the “blankest year” of the Space Age.
As of Sept. 27, 2008, the sun had been blank, i.e., had no visible sunspots, on 200 days of the year. To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go back to 1954, three years before the launch of Sputnik, when the sun was blank 241 times.
“Sunspot counts are at a 50-year low,” says solar physicist David Hathaway of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. “We’re experiencing a deep minimum of the solar cycle.”
Above: A histogram showing the blankest years of the last half-century. The vertical axis is a count of spotless days in each year. The bar for 2008, which was updated on Sept. 27th, is still growing. [Larger images: 50 years, 100 years]
A spotless day looks like this:
The image, taken by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) on Sept. 27, 2008, shows a solar disk completely unmarked by sunspots. For comparison, a SOHO image taken seven years earlier on Sept. 27, 2001, is peppered with colossal sunspots, all crackling with solar flares: image. The difference is the phase of the 11-year solar cycle. 2001 was a year of solar maximum, with lots of sunspots, solar flares and geomagnetic storms. 2008 is at the cycle’s opposite extreme, solar minimum, a quiet time on the sun.
And it is a very quiet time. If solar activity continues as low as it has been, 2008 could rack up a whopping 290 spotless days by the end of December, making it a century-level year in terms of spotlessness.
Hathaway cautions that this development may sound more exciting than it actually is: “While the solar minimum of 2008 is shaping up to be the deepest of the Space Age, it is still unremarkable compared to the long and deep solar minima of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.” Those earlier minima routinely racked up 200 to 300 spotless days per year.
Some solar physicists are welcoming the lull.
“This gives us a chance to study the sun without the complications of sunspots,” says Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “Right now we have the best instrumentation in history looking at the sun. There is a whole fleet of spacecraft devoted to solar physics–SOHO, Hinode, ACE, STEREO and others. We’re bound to learn new things during this long solar minimum.”
As an example he offers helioseismology: “By monitoring the sun’s vibrating surface, helioseismologists can probe the stellar interior in much the same way geologists use earthquakes to probe inside Earth. With sunspots out of the way, we gain a better view of the sun’s subsurface winds and inner magnetic dynamo.””There is also the matter of solar irradiance,” adds Pesnell. “Researchers are now seeing the dimmest sun in their records. The change is small, just a fraction of a percent, but significant. Questions about effects on climate are natural if the sun continues to dim.”
Pesnell is NASA’s project scientist for the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a new spacecraft equipped to study both solar irradiance and helioseismic waves. Construction of SDO is complete, he says, and it has passed pre-launch vibration and thermal testing. “We are ready to launch! Solar minimum is a great time to go.”
Coinciding with the string of blank suns is a 50-year record low in solar wind pressure, a recent discovery of the Ulysses spacecraft. (See the Science@NASA story Solar Wind Loses Pressure.) The pressure drop began years before the current minimum, so it is unclear how the two phenomena are connected, if at all. This is another mystery for SDO and the others.
Who knew the blank sun could be so interesting?
The sun’s not making nice-nice.
There’s a plage area in the eastern edge of the southern hemisphere, showing just above a “stuck pixel” on the continuum image. Checking the magnetogram, it’s black leading white, which I guess makes this another possible SC23 event. Seems to be rather high in latitude for this late in the cycle. It has gotten a bit stronger throughout the day today, though it remains to be seen if this will even develop into a sunspeck. Should know by tomorrow if this develops further or sinks back into oblivion.
To Diatribical Idiot
If Science keeps the lid on too many things (minimalizes), then all that is left is alarmism, and you know how that goes. Science is under mandate to the grantors to make it’s info public, and if they leave too many things hanging in the breeze, the unlearned and/or the unsavory will soon find it and blow totally out of proportion. The internet has changed our society, and where there is stone cold silence or guffawing dismissal, there will be suspicion and interpretation. You’ll get this either way, but if you allow the default you then become the conspriing enemy. Don’t be a victim.
Remember this opening to the post “Sun Remains in a Magnetic Funk”?:
“While sunspots are often cited as the main proxy indicator of solar activity, there is another indicator which I view as equally (if not more) important. The Average Planetary Magnetic index (Ap), the strength of which ties into Svensmark’s cosmic ray theory modulating Earth’s cloud cover.”
Remember this?:
Leif Svalgaard (10:58:08) :
“Gary Gulrud (10:17:59) :
Tell us what point Anthony made or inferrence expected or the reader that is facilitated by your “adjusted data”?
Anthony said:
“I also decided to update the plot of the 10.7 centimeter band solar radio flux, also a metric of solar activity.”
He clearly intended to plot a metric of solar activity, not of the variation of the distance to the Sun.”
The problem here is not one of memory, yours is unparalleled, but of a recurrent, tendentious death-grip on evident contradictions.
An hallmark of Wittgenstein is that the notion, ‘words possess an ostensive sense’, is a source of philosophic confusion. He laboured to show that they more properly had a use in situ, in their context, and those uses defy assignment of referents.
I believe, with some reason, that Leif maintains a perspective emblematic logical positivism espoused by the Vienna Circle.
This does not explain this behavior of perseveration, but its recurrent context. The earlier case isn’t ‘forgotten’, the amygdala is simply in a loop that leaves it inaccessible, unavailable.
Gary Gulrud (03:57:18) :
You should have heeded Wittgenstein’s dictum:
“wovon man nicht reden kann, darüber sollte man schweigen.”
Note: Which translates to “About which one cannot talk one should remain silent”. Lets all play nice. – Anne
Gary Gulrud (03:57:18) : . . . . . .
I’m weary of your convoluted impotent attempts at intellectual condescension. You appear to obsess on logical nitpicks when you should be pursing civil discourse regarding the interpretation of data.
garron:
The feedback is appreciated. I have no fundamental disagreement with anything but:
“you should be pursing civil discourse regarding the interpretation of data”
The implication that any member of our species would or could set aside their passions discussing the evidence for or against the overarching issue at this site, AGW, with all it’s economic and social consequences, is motivated either in self-delusion or considered deception.
For the few who come here with no preconceived opinion: They would be unconscionably remiss to long remain so disposed.
No opinion, expressed by anyone here, at bottom issues from reason; that behavior is not part of our frame. Reason is a slave at the behest of belief and conviction.
Gary Gulrud (08:43:52) : “. . . . . . . . .Reason is a slave at the behest of belief and conviction.”
Pretense at being more than animal may be returned in kind . Empathy may lead to reconciliation. Self cross-examination may bring clarify.
So much of intercourse has become showbiz. Form is king. Deception queen. Every nugget that may be truth buried under a avalanche of under-rationalize opinion void of logic or citation.
I’m just an ancient high school dropout longing for the spirit of past amicable debates over plate tectonics and light as wave and particle. Passion and politics were there but for the most part., the desire to ascertain fact trumped belief and conviction.
I would ask you to consider — in some exchanges, not going for the jugular is in you better interest and, of the species.
Returning to C14 dating:
“It’s not about dating, as that can be done by counting tree rings and a reliable [to one year certainty] tree ring chronology goes back 10,000 years. It is, in fact, the error in the 14C date that gives us the proxy.”
Thinking about this for a minute is revealing. Samples from the dendrochronologic sequence are radiocarbon dated and the C14 series is ‘calibrated’. A curve of C14 concentration is generated as represented by the tree cores.
This means the standard error of the dating process remains: The number of remaining C14 atoms are counted and the proportion of total Carbon computed. Plugging this into a simple differential equation results in the estimate of time elapsed, and thus the date of tissue death.
With calibration one is performing a check on the result which ostensibly adds information. The Thera radiocarbon date was done by a German lab and was calibrated, and yet remains in error by 6%. Why?
The fundamental assumption is that the CO2, and its C14 are well mixed.
But Thera was an active volcano residing in the Mediterranean. The olive tree was bathed daily by C14 depleted CO2 from ocean outgassing, and for at least the last decade of its life, by volcanic outgassing, with CO2 devoid of C14. So the sample is unrepresentatively ‘old’.
Second, as indicated above, the 1600 AD calibration sample is unrepresentatively ‘new’ and does not aid accuracy in dating artifacts of the Mediterranean or its perimeter.
“I would ask you to consider — in some exchanges, not going for the jugular is in you better interest and, of the species.”
Right address, wrong street.
Gary Gulrud
Credit to you, I’ve never heard as high degree of bulldust expressed so eloquently!
M. H.: Well, I am glad someone is amused.