From the UK Telegraph – source link
The protective bubble around the sun that helps to shield the Earth from harmful interstellar radiation is shrinking and getting weaker, NASA scientists have warned.
By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent
Last Updated: 9:23AM BST 19 Oct 2008
New data has revealed that the heliosphere, the protective shield of energy that surrounds our solar system, has weakened by 25 per cent over the past decade and is now at it lowest level since the space race began 50 years ago.
Scientists are baffled at what could be causing the barrier to shrink in this way and are to launch mission to study the heliosphere.
The Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, will be launched from an aircraft on Sunday on a Pegasus rocket into an orbit 150,000 miles above the Earth where it will “listen” for the shock wave that forms as our solar system meets the interstellar radiation.
Dr Nathan Schwadron, co-investigator on the IBEX mission at Boston University, said: “The interstellar medium, which is part of the galaxy as a whole, is actually quite a harsh environment. There is a very high energy galactic radiation that is dangerous to living things.
“Around 90 per cent of the galactic cosmic radiation is deflected by our heliosphere, so the boundary protects us from this harsh galactic environment.”
The heliosphere is created by the solar wind, a combination of electrically charged particles and magnetic fields that emanate a more than a million miles an hour from the sun, meet the intergalactic gas that fills the gaps in space between solar systems.
At the boundary where they meet a shock wave is formed that deflects interstellar radiation around the solar system as it travels through the galaxy.
The scientists hope the IBEX mission will allow them to gain a better understanding of what happens at this boundary and help them predict what protection it will offer in the future.
Without the heliosphere the harmful intergalactic cosmic radiation would make life on Earth almost impossible by destroying DNA and making the climate uninhabitable.
Measurements made by the Ulysses deep space probe, which was launched in 1990 to orbit the sun, have shown that the pressure created inside the heliosphere by the solar wind has been decreasing.
Dr David McComas, principal investigator on the IBEX mission, said: “It is a fascinating interaction that our sun has with the galaxy surrounding us. This million mile an hour wind inflates this protective bubble that keeps us safe from intergalactic cosmic rays.
“With less pressure on the inside, the interaction at the boundaries becomes weaker and the heliosphere as a whole gets smaller.”
If the heliosphere continues to weaken, scientists fear that the amount of cosmic radiation reaching the inner parts of our solar system, including Earth, will increase.
This could result in growing levels of disruption to electrical equipment, damage satellites and potentially even harm life on Earth.
But Dr McComas added that it was still unclear exactly what would happen if the heliosphere continued to weaken or what even what the timescale for changes in the heliosphere are.
He said: “There is no imminent danger, but it is hard to know what the future holds. Certainly if the solar wind pressure was to continue to go down and the heliosphere were to almost evaporate then we would be in this sea of galactic cosmic rays. That could have some large effects.
“It is likely that there are natural variations in solar wind pressure and over time it will either stabilise or start going back up.”
(hat tip to Dvid Gladstone)
As a part of my research into heliospheric current interaction with planetary magnetospheres I attempted to calculate relative value of solar dynamo’s strength at times of solar minima. Preliminary results are shown on the graph.
http://www.vukcevic.co.uk/solar_dynamo.gif
Numbers are minima before SC No. I am not certain that my method was correct but it does confirm the news about weakening of Heliosphere by 25% in last 50 years.
WARNING: THESE ARE ONLY PRELIMINARY RESULTS!
Leif Svalgaard:
Says: “TSI, solar flux, and sunspots go low every 11 years.”
Yes, but to be accurate, its not every 11´th year we set record in for example the Oulu Neutron monitor:
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/attachments/oulu.jpg
To this you might say: “Well thats not much of a record! And its only in the measurements since 1964”.
True, but try to see how close the peaks are to each other every 11´th year.
Compared to this narrow and constant level, the peak and the duration of the peak 2008 actually appaers somewhat different. (In fact the very latest data from Oulu are a little higher.)
So maybe you can say they “go low every 11 year”, but i dont realy think that is a perfect picture of the situation.
my god, its everytime i write to Leif, someone else have written the exact same. Sorry Leif!
PearlandAggie (10:35:38) :
True. I guess I never really considered that the heliosphere shrinks during EVERY solar minimum! Oops! 🙂
It is a bit more complicated [and I should have said that earlier]. The TSI/F10.7/SSN that you referred to are low at EVERY minimum, but the solar wind flow pressure has a more convoluted history. The pressure, P, is defined as P ~ n * V^2, where n is the density and V is the speed. The speed is often high during the declining phase of a cycle, thus making P high there. On the other hand, V is often low at solar maximum, making P lower there. Finally, the density is the quantity that is most difficult to measure and there are systematic differences [up to 20% or more] between spacecraft, so some of the long term trends are uncertain. You can see a long discussion of this at http://omniweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/html/omni2_doc.html#pla_i
Just to remind you of the run of P:
http://www.leif.org/research/SolarWindFlowPressure.png
Re; Pamela Gray, and Leif Svalgaard comments.
Pamela, you mentioned the Cosmic ray flux cycle “flattening” every 22 years; and that seems to me to relate to the full magnetic cycle related to sunspots.
Given that the earth’s cosmic ray/charged particle flux is influenced by both solar and earth magnetic fields, and that the sunspot polarity switches every 11 year cycle; the total manetic effect on charged particles has to have this 22 year cyle as those two components “aid” or “interfere”
I’m not nearly smart enough to do the vector sum of the sunspot, and earth fields, even if I knew what the solar component looked like; but I expect some 22 year cycle, and as you say, it does show up in the obseved CR flux, and also apparently in earth climate warming/cooling. I can’t quantify the cosmic ray/climate effect but I find the work on this by our Scandinavian friends to be quite compelling; through a cloud formation mechanism.
I’m with Leif on this new cloak flap. I have no idea why it might wax and wane, but I’m not surprised it does. Now what would really surprise me, would be if that shield suddenly disappeared altogether. The local universe environment would have to change in some inexplicable way to have no blanket.
Right now cosmic rays don’t seem to be exactly frying our brains, and I suspect the effect of a small increase, will not be a problem, at least radiationally; but what about the effect on the earth temperature.
To my simple brain, more cosmic rays means easier cloud formation in the tropics, and cooler surface temperatures due to the combined effect of increased albedo, and increased absorption by clouds.
It is becoming increasingly difficult for anyone to convince me that solar behavior both magnetically (related to sunspots), this security blanket, cosmic rays, and ocean evaporation, are NOT all in cahoots in controlling the mean earth surface temperature, through cloud modulation.
I think it is time to stick a stake through Arhennius and his CO2 thesis. It was great while it lasted; and made a lot of money for Al Gore; but enough is enough.
You do dig out a lot of interesting stuff here Anthony.
George
Just for fun I took the .jpg of Solar Wind Flow Pressure from Lief
http://www.leif.org/research/SolarWindFlowPressure.png
& overlayed it with a plot of USHCN temps
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/CO2HCNlongterm.jpg
to see if there was any visual correlation. From 1965 to 1995, it is somewhat interesting and appears to have a positive correlation (inc flow pressure = inc temps). However, after 1995, it completely falls aparts – no visual correlation, positive or negative. If Solar wind flow pressure is a factor, it appears (at least with the datasets on hand) to be a much less significant factor compared to factors such as cyclical oceanic circulation patterns (PDO, ENSO, etc)
See :
http://www.weatherquestions.com/Global-warming-natural-PDO.htm
and
http://www.intellicast.com/Community/Content.aspx?ref=rss&a=151
Rom,
It is fifty years since I had any involvement in cosmic rays, and very little at that. One signature of cosmic ray variability is the formation of radio-carbon 14 from atmospheric nitrogen. The early days of radio carbon dating, were based on the assumption that the rate of C14 formation in the atmosphere was absolutely constant. this led to some carbon artifacts being incorrectly dated.
Tree ring studies based on the Bristle-cone pines, that grow in the White Mountains in the Cal/Nev region were used to “correect” the radio carbon time scale, at least back for about 4000 years, and actually ended up changing some world history, when pottery kiln and shards form Spain, were found to be older than the middle eastern ones which had been assumed to be the origin of that particular pottery culture, indicating that that technology had gone east, from its source; and not west from mesopotamia.
One intersting note is that the absence of C14 in fossil fuels, because of their age, is supposed to be one signature of man made CO2 in the atmosphere. But a lower than “normal” C14 abundance, can also be a signature of a period of lower cosmic ray flux; and by inference lower cloud formation and a warm period on earth (and one NOT caused by fossil CO2)
But Radio Carbon 14 is not long lived enough to go very far back in the geologic history to look for cosmic ray fossils.
In any case; much of the CR activity takes place in the upepr atmosphere, and the charged particle showers resulting from such events are rather mundane creatures whose main influence on us or climate would be through water droplet formation. Uncharged particles like neutrons, are going to go charging right through the atmosphere mostly, and might result in stable isotopes of unusual occurrence frequency.
If it were me, I would put the research dollars into looking at more current solar/earth physics, than worrying about what happened during the Cambrian
Leif,
This is out of topic, but I am curious.
In the magnetogram of SOHO, 10/21 17:25
there is a track visible!! white, at 10:00 oclock north, close to the tiny Tim of Catania
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/mdi_mag/512/
If it were black , I would thinkg “dead pixels”. Can it be a cosmic track in the detector? Have you seen something like this before?
I am waiting for the next update.
@Anthony’s Reply to me at 6:14:11
I didn’t mean any disrespect in asking who Leif is. I had googled his name and checked out his website, but I couldn’t get a clear cut answer. His website doesn’t tell me much (autobiographical) other than give his research. There were only 13,500 google hits (which is a low amount) and the top several pages returned didn’t give any indication.
To be sure, I found more on him being a programmer then I did solar scientist. Nothing immediately pops up that makes me say “oh, no kidding he’s pretty important”. I assumed that as you respected him, he is worth respecting, which is why I asked who he was.
I’m also not a scientist and only a daily reader of your blog. I also don’t subscribe to scientific publications. So, it’s my casual reader position that led to my ignorance.
So I apologize if it came off the wrong way, I didn’t mean to. I had done research and it resulted in me not finding much. Sometimes it’s easier just to ask people in the comments section as it yields quick and concise results.
I’ve always been interested in this solar wind “pressure”. Do you have a reference for “decreases with the square of the distance”? Is there observational evidence that supports this? Thanks Leif. I always enjoy your comments.
Stevie B (12:35:06) :
To be sure, I found more on him being a programmer then I did solar scientist. Nothing immediately pops up that makes me say “oh, no kidding he’s pretty important”. I assumed that as you respected him, he is worth respecting, which is why I asked who he was.
Stevie, I’m not going to tell you how “important’ I am. This is not my nature. As some indication I may point out that I am on the NASA panel of solar experts to predict solar cycle 24. Let that suffice.
George,
I think it is time to stick a stake through Arhennius and his CO2 thesis. It was great while it lasted; and made a lot of money for Al Gore; but enough is enough.
That’s a bit harsh on Arrhenius. He’s not responsible for what people have done with his observations subsequently and as I understand it thought that rising CO2 would be relatively beneficial. The real *******s came later!
Lansner, Frank (11:03:23) :
In fact the very latest data from Oulu are a little higher.
The cosmic ray flux at any given observatory varies with the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field at that location. So different observatories report slightly different results over time because of different long-term trends of the Earth’s field. Here is a comparison of the counting rate at Moscow and Oulu: http://www.leif.org/research/CosmicRayFlux3.png
In order to compare the two stations on the same plot the Oulu data has been normalized to have the same mean [over same time] as the Moscow data. The green curve is the average. You can see the different trends of the blue and red curves. If one normalizes many stations, the picture that emerges is that the minimum peaks are very much the same to within a fraction of a percent.
If you go to http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/alerts/solar_indices.html
you’ll see that the Neutron Monitor flux % of background for yesterday was 99.9%. The day before that is was 100.1%. All this means is that the cosmic ray flux is just where is should be consistent with no [or almost no] solar cycle modulation. It is at the long-term background. In spite of the ‘protective bubble being smaller’.
Leif,
I appreciate the response. I read your posts and take them seriously. No disrespect was ever intended. Thanks for frequenting these message boards and weighing in on the articles. Everyone else seemed to know who you were, so I figured I’d ask.
nanny,
many physical phenomena (including Newton’s law of universal gravitation, radiation, and acoustics) vary inversely with the radius (distance) squared. the r^2 term usually has to do with the fact that the surface area of a sphere is 4*Pi*r^2, so whenever a spherical area term is used, 1/r^2 will be in the equation.
Sorry, O/T but I can’t find an e-mail address to send this to:
Interesting story about North Greenland shoreline. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081020095850.htm
Apparently, it was warmer 6000-7000 years ago than it is now. Of coruse, the scientist uphold the faith with
“Changes that took place 6000-7000 years ago were controlled by other climatic forces than those which seem to dominate today,” Astrid Lyså believes.
nanny_govt_sucks (13:03:19) :
Solar wind must comply with the inverse square law as it is expanding in a sphere. It does fluctuate though.
… Just because someone doesn’t accept every crackpot solar theory as fact it doesn’t automatically mean they are AGW supporters.
Which “crackpot solar theory” did you mean, John? Why the straw man? I thought only AGWers did that. Your original question “How much longer would global temperatures need to remain at current relatively high levels for you to be convinced that the sun is not, in fact, a major factor in short-term climate shifts” wasn’t a question at all but a statement, another common trick of AGWers. I mimmicked your question to show how ridiculous it was.
Leif, I have a question.
Stereo B is ~38 degrees behind earth in orbit. I believe that it’s final destination will be at 90 degrees behind earth and, with stereo A at 90 degrees in front of earth, will be able to show the entire sun surface.
My question — How will this affect the spot count?
I know this will be great in forcasting space weather for dangerous storms ETC.
The culprit is OBVIOUSLY the historically unprecedented increase of man-made objects that the human race has carelessly, in its continuously wanton destruction of natural enviroments, spread around the solar system. Plus, probably Voyager punctured the Helioshphere when leaving and its been leaking away ever since.
These man-made objects have increased by eleventy billion percent since 1957. There are no other possible answers that would explain this phenomenon.
Only denialist enemies of mankind would deny this obvious truth.
Thanks Anthony, Leif, and all those who contribute. You make this blog well worth a daily visit!
Leif
First a toast for all prominent Danes in the debate, Svalgaard, Svensmark and Lomborg 😉 Even though you have different opinions to some degree.
And then thanks for reply.
I have read a lot of your writings. I get a general impression that you, should we say, are slightly sceptical of the “sceptics”?
As you can see in blogs like this, we are many that expects colder global temperatures due to cold PDO, sun etcetc.
My question 1: Would you be surpriced if the world was indeed cooling down from now on and into the next decades? Do you have an opninion on this?
Just your overall opinion/estimate 🙂
Then another thing.
I personally think it would be so easyly understandable if the suns behaviour could be related to the suns movement around the centre of the solar system. Some tidal forces could contribute to solar activity, as you have been talking about/against some times.
To some degree there seems to be a more-than-random match between solar movement and temperatures at earth?
http://landscheidt.auditblogs.com/files/2007/05/sunssbam1620to2180.gif
But I as an eager debator in Denmark, i dont use this in my argumentation, because theres something in the match thats not perfect.
For example in the Dalton minimum, og the period 1940-77 we do indeed see that the sun slows down around the center. BUT. It does so in the second half of the cooling period!??
Have you any idea why this is?
The Dalton minumum is approx 1800-1830 but the sun first realy slow down around 1820. And in the cool period 1940-77, the sun slows down around 1960. (And there is a vulcano, but first in 1815…)
So on one hand for me it DOES seem striking, that more-than-randomly, the sun has a slow down when temperatures cool down on earth, but its just not that perfect a match.
quetion 2:Howcome we have a more-than-random-match and still these not-perfect timings? Could it be that the slowing down of the suns movement around the center of the solar system has an effect on tidal forces 10-20 years from the slowest point in the suns movement?
Gary Gulrud (10:56:49) :
So the geomagnetic dipole has been in decline for a century and a half, the solar poloidal field is down 20-30%, the solar wind, in which the IMF is carried, is down 25% over the last decade, the noctilucent clouds are perfectly anti-correlated with solar minimums and at an all time high, the toroidal fields are less evident than at any time in over a century, …
The folks deserve better than this.
So the geomagnetic dipole has been in decline for a century and a half
Has nothing to do with the Sun, just fluff.
the solar poloidal field is down 20-30%
The solar polar fields are down 44% thereby predicting a solar cycle also down 44%
the solar wind, in which the IMF is carried, is down 25% over the last decade
As it would be at the minimum after a full cycle. The ‘last decade’ presumably means the average over the last 10 years. And said average will be higher than the minimum value, 31% in fact, so a vacuous statement if the intent was to show that the value now is unusually low.
noctilucent clouds are perfectly anti-correlated with solar minimums and at an all time high
‘perfectly’? The clouds are due to water molecules. Perhaps there is more water in the mesosphere? Ultraviolet radiation from the Sun breaks water molecules apart, reducing the amount of water available to form noctilucent clouds. At solar minimum there is less UV and that minimum value doesn’t vary from cycle to cycle [as we know from the amplitude of the Sq-variation], so no dependence on solar activity or long term trend.
the toroidal fields are less evident than at any time in over a century
Muddled. The toroidal fields are just sunspots and that number falls to pretty much zero at every minimum.
The sun get’s like this every eleven years.
At least you got that right.
Perhaps would you be interested by this new ?
http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE49K6Y720081021
Stevie B (13:37:16) :
Thanks for frequenting these message boards and weighing in on the articles. Everyone else seemed to know who you were, so I figured I’d ask.
Thanks for asking. I used to have my C.V. on my website, but it seemed to attract unsavory persons, so I stopped.
You are correct for picking up on the programming bit. I was co-implementer of a historically important operating system [RC4000] and worked many years in the computer industry.