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)
Ted Annonson (13:56:47) :
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.
It will not have a final destination [you can’t just stop in space] but will continue to lag behind and eventually come full circle and be in front of the Sun.
My question — How will this affect the spot count?
I know this will be great in forcasting space weather for dangerous storms ETC.
We don’t know how we’ll deal with this. My advice is that it should not affect the spot count in order to maintain the historical series. At some point a century from now when we have complete coverage all the time, we will simply double the historical count.
Lansner, Frank (14:27:44) :
<i.I get a general impression that you, should we say, are slightly skeptical of the “skeptics”?
I find that everyone with an agenda plays dirty. The ‘skeptics’ are too skeptical and as a result create their own dogma [“it’s the Sun, stupid”]
My question 1: Would you be surprised 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 🙂
No, not at all. I expect it to cool down because of the pseudo-periodicity of its ‘internal oscillations [PDO etc].
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.
And since the match is not so good, I personally don’t think it is other than rough coincidence.
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?
That has been discussed to death here and elsewhere. There are two problems:
1) the sun is in free fall in its orbit and feels no forces
2) other that tidal forces from the planets and those are minuscule.
I had a long discussion with Carsten on this. His question was why the Sun’s motion around the barycenter would not be reflected in the distance between the Sun and the Earth [it isn’t].
Leif
Thanks for the info.
Cathy (10:59:16) :
“The Arctic Sea Ice Chart had a seizure and now it’s back on track and WHAT a track (it may be warming globally, but the ice returneth up North:”
Arctic ice returning in late October….and still below the mean extent…what a story!
anna v (12:21:33) :
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 not Leif, but that is certainly a cosmic ray. It is very common in digital astronomical imaging, there are special calibration techniques to remove them in images etc.
Nothing special.
[…] is the original: Comment on Sun’s protective ‘bubble’ is shrinking by Lansner, Frank Tags: climate, climate-skeptic, Dalton Minimum, global-warming, national-post, obama, […]
Leif, thanks again for your answer.
You say: “I find that everyone with an agenda plays dirty.”
Thats very very true.
If i have an opinion, however, its not the same as agenda. I shifted opinion this february, purely on basis of logic and arguments. I became “sceptic”.
But i understand if you feel that there is an agenda around, because we´re in the middle of what seems to be a dirty war. Very dirty.
Pressure generates contrapressure. If the sceptics sometimes appears as havig an agenda, it did not come from nowhere.
Then your believe in “coincidence” to explain a lot of things concearning sun-earth-temperature relationships: Just a simple math will reveal, that pure coincidence is in fact very unlikely. I just dont find that explanation/argumentation enough to move anything, to be honest.
Its not an agenda, but to believe is such proportions of coincidence is just not possible. There must be a better explanation.
K.R. Frank
The very short mean, that is. Indeed, what a story. What will you say when it exceeds the mean?
Leif Svalgaard (15:09:07) :
I had a long discussion with Carsten on this. His question was why the Sun’s motion around the barycenter would not be reflected in the distance between the Sun and the Earth [it isn’t].
I am still schizophrenic to some degree on the issue, although I accept that if the variation in measurments of TSI does indeed match the theoretical effect of the elliptic earth orbit, to a precision better than measurement accuracy, it is hard to get around. Still puzzling from a gravity point of view though.
Partly due to that discussion, I made a new simulator showing the sun’s motion around the barycenter, also looking for clues on solar flares and other things:
http://arnholm.org/astro/sun/sc24/sim2/
What this tells me, is that the motions are slow but interesting. It is very hard to see that gravitational effects can play any major role, although the gravity force on the sun varies a little. It is still in free fall.
This spells s-c-a-m. And it spells it WRONG, too.
http://tubbotwins.wordpress.com
[…] Sun’s protective ‘bubble’ is shrinking From the UK Telegraph – source link The protective bubble around the sun that helps to shield the Earth from harmful […] […]
Mary Hinge (15:24:35) :
Arctic ice returning in late October….and still below the mean extent…what a story!
Interesting that the mean extent is calculated from 1979 (assuming when satellite records started)….a rather cold period I would suspect. I wonder how the mean extent would look if 1956 was used as the base year?
Well, is that an assumption, or is it based on observations?
When I look at pictures of heliosphere bow shock, I see a pretty clear delineation at the shock front. Not what I would expect from a “pressure” that falls off with the square of the distance.
Lansner, Frank (16:22:46) :
Then your believe in “coincidence” to explain a lot of things concerning sun-earth-temperature relationships: Just a simple math will reveal, that pure coincidence is in fact very unlikely.
This is not quite what I meant. If you look at a noisy correlation, some of the wiggles might line up by chance or coincidence. If you are a firm believer you will tend to accept these chance alignments as real [i.e. caused by the driver you are considering] and to classify the ones that don’t as just noise. This will bias you perception of the relationship. There is a time-honored way of resolving this, and that is to be specific: select the two time series you believe shows the ‘best’ correlation. There are standard statistical tests for deciding if the relation is ‘statistical significant’ at a given level of confidence. We can do this for all to see. Now, a counter-argument that I often are met with is that that is too much work for something that thousands of peer-reviewed papers already show to be true. So what shall it be?
Lansner, Frank (14:27:44) :
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…)
I first saw Carl Smith’s graph (your link) a few months back which lead me onto further research. While I am not convinced on barycenterism it does show a “relationship” between the planets and the sun thru time. Some of the dates you have supplied in your question are confusing but i do see a correlation at 1650, 1830, 1970 and now with less solar activity and also noted the planetary positions at that time. I have researched your point about 1830 not being the start of the Dalton, but at the same time also realize that the sunspot records pre 1850 are not considered reliable. Leif’s 10Be records altho not conclusive do throw some extra doubt on the pre 1850 records.
Carl’s graph shows us the next year or so could be interesting and should prove the theory either way. Carl is very sick and his prognosis is not good, and i have agreed to moderate his site.
I made a small report using his graph and solar views that you might be interested in.
http://users.beagle.com.au/geoffsharp/gasgiants.pdf
nanny_govt_sucks (17:22:42) :
Solar wind must comply with the inverse square law as it is expanding in a sphere.
Well, is that an assumption, or is it based on observations?
That is an observational fact. It was also expected because of conservation of mass: the number of solar wind particles passing through two spheres around the sun must be the same, and the area of those spheres scales with the square of the radius.
When I look at pictures of heliosphere bow shock, I see a pretty clear delineation at the shock front. Not what I would expect from a “pressure” that falls off with the square of the distance.
At the shock the solar wind is effectively stopped and there is no further fall-off [as it doesn’t go any further as an organized flow].
Carsten Arnholm, Norway (16:35:07) :
it is hard to get around. Still puzzling from a gravity point of view though.
It puzzles me that that should be puzzling. Using the laws of gravity, JPL [ http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?ephemerides ] calculates theoretically the distance between any two solar system bodies, and the calculated distance between the Sun and the Earth is just what it should be from the Earth following a simple ellipse around the Sun [apart from very, very small planetary perturbations].
nobwainer (17:32:38) :
I have researched your point about 1830 not being the start of the Dalton, but at the same time also realize that the sunspot records pre 1850 are not considered reliable.
There is doubt about the relative number of spots, but after 1810 not about the timing of max and min.
I don’t know if this question has been answered already, but here goes… I’m in my 50’s. I remember reading about the first solar neutrino detection experiments in the newspapers years ago (late 1960’s?). Apparently, the solar neutrino flux (number of neutrinos from the sun per year) was way below original estimates. Physicists were saying that either their theories were totally out to lunch, or else the sun had “shut down internally”. I totally forgot about that long ago, until reading this discussion woke up some old memories. I assume that those questions have been answered by now. Any idea what happened?
Still puzzling from a gravity point of view though.
From a previous thread:
Because the barycenter is mainly determined by Jupiter [apart from the sun, of course] it moves but slowly [12 years to go round – or if you like, the Sun moves but slowly]. Launch a spacecraft from the [almost stationary] barycenter such that the spacecraft’s circular orbit takes it around the Sun. Because of its proximity to the Sun, the spacecraft will move very fast, completing its orbit [and returning to the barycenter] every few hours. Its distance from the Sun’s center is constant, yet “every object in the solar system, no exception, orbits the barycenter”. What does the spacecraft do? does it go around the barycenter in a circular orbit every few hours? yet passes through the very barycenter every few hours. What would your simulator say?
And for clarification:
The spacecraft and the Earth are both planets [albeit of different size]. They are both ‘primary’ bodies of the solar system. Same gravity laws apply for both.
Walter Dnes (18:26:33) :
Apparently, the solar neutrino flux (number of neutrinos from the sun per year) was way below original estimates […] I assume that those questions have been answered by now. Any idea what happened?
Yes this has been resolved. It turns out that neutrinos have mass [tiny] and that allows them to oscillate between the three kinds of neutrinos that can exist. The Sun only produces the so-called electron-neutrino. En route to the Earth, a third of these become muon-neutrinos and another third becomes tau-neutrinos [actually they change back and forth many, many times]. The first neutrino detectors could only detect electron-neutrinos, so only observed a third of the expected flux. Modern detectors have managed to detect all three kinds, and there is no longer a ‘neutrino problem’. On the contrary, the neutrino measurements show that our ideas about the solar interior and the energy production were correct.
Thanks so much, Anthony, for another great article. I’m no scientist, but I love your website!
If the sun continues to generate such fascinating news, maybe we can stop worrying about those lawn mower emissions pretty soon…
[…] Sun’s protective ‘bubble’ is shrinking […]
Leif Svalgaard (18:13:48) :
There is doubt about the relative number of spots, but after 1810 not about the timing of max and min.
The 1790 maximum is perhaps the group that doesnt fit the SSB graph which has also been questioned by at least one paper as we have talked about previously and will probably be impossible to prove or disprove. But as you say the accuracy before 1810 is patchy but the sunspot numbers after that are also important if we are trying to follow a correlation. It is plausible to me that there could have been a “phase catastrophe” in the 1790 cycle that caused the following solar slowdown and was then later backed up in 1830.
Leif Svalgaard (13:04:52) :
Ah, a lesson in humility, eh? 🙂 At least SC24 is a great learning experience.