From NASA News: Solar ‘Current of Fire’ Speeds Up
What in the world is the sun up to now?
In today’s issue of Science, NASA solar physicist David Hathaway reports that the top of the sun’s Great Conveyor Belt has been running at record-high speeds for the past five years.
“I believe this could explain the unusually deep solar minimum we’ve been experiencing,” says Hathaway. “The high speed of the conveyor belt challenges existing models of the solar cycle and it has forced us back to the drawing board for new ideas.”
The Great Conveyor Belt is a massive circulating current of fire (hot plasma) within the sun. It has two branches, north and south, each taking about 40 years to complete one circuit. Researchers believe the turning of the belt controls the sunspot cycle.
Above: An artist’s concept of the sun’s Great Conveyor Belt. [larger image]
Hathaway has been monitoring the conveyor belt using data from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). The top of the belt skims the surface of the sun, sweeping up knots of solar magnetism and carrying them toward the poles. SOHO is able to track those knots—Hathaway calls them “magnetic elements”–and thus reveal the speed of the underlying flow.
“It’s a little like measuring the speed of a river on Earth by clocking the leaves and twigs floating downstream,” Hathaway explains.SOHO’s dataset extends all the way back to 1996 and spans a complete solar cycle. Last year, Lisa Rightmire, a student of Hathaway from the University of Memphis, spent the entire summer measuring magnetic elements. When she plotted their speeds vs. time, she noticed how fast the conveyor belt has been going.
A note about “fast”: The Great Conveyor Belt is one of the biggest things in the whole solar system and by human standards it moves with massive slowness. “Fast” in this context means 10 to 15 meters per second (20 to 30 miles per hour). A good bicyclist could easily keep up.
Below: The velocity of the Great Conveyor Belt (a.k.a. “meridianal flow”) since 1996. Note the higher speeds after ~2004. credit: Hathaway and Rightmire, 2010. [larger image]
The speed-up was surprising on two levels.
First, it coincided with the deepest solar minimum in nearly 100 years, contradicting models that say a fast-moving belt should boost sunspot production. The basic idea is that the belt sweeps up magnetic fields from the sun’s surface and drags them down to the sun’s inner dynamo. There the fields are amplified to form the underpinnings of new sunspots. A fast-moving belt should accelerate this process.
So where have all the sunspots been? The solar minimum of 2008-2009 was unusually deep and now the sun appears to be on the verge of a weak solar cycle.
Instead of boosting sunspots, Hathaway believes that a fast-moving Conveyor Belt can instead suppress them “by counteracting magnetic diffusion at the sun’s equator.” He describes the process in detail in Science (“Variations in the Sun’s Meridional Flow over a Solar Cycle,” 12 March 2010, v327, 1350-1352).
The second surprise has to do with the bottom of the Conveyor Belt.
SOHO can only clock the motions of the visible top layer. The bottom is hidden by ~200,000 kilometers of overlying plasma. Nevertheless, an estimate of its speed can be made by tracking sunspots.
“Sunspots are supposedly rooted to the bottom of the belt,” says Hathaway. “So the motion of sunspots tells us how fast the belt is moving down there.”
He’s done that—plotted sunspot speeds vs. time since 1996—and the results don’t make sense. “While the top of the conveyor belt has been moving at record-high speed, the bottom seems to be moving at record-low speed. Another contradiction.”
Above: An artist’s concept of the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Launched in Feb. 2010, SDO will be able to look inside the sun to study the conveyor belt in greater detail, perhaps solving the mysteries Hathaway and Rightmire have uncovered. [larger image]
Could it be that sunspots are not rooted to the bottom of the Conveyor Belt, after all? “That’s one possibility” he notes. “Sunspots could be moving because of dynamo waves or some other phenomenon not directly linked to the belt.”
What researchers really need is a good look deep inside the sun. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, launched in February 2010, will provide that when its instruments come online later this year. SDO is able to map the sun’s interior using a technique called helioseismology. SOHO can do the same thing, but not well enough to trace the Great Conveyor Belt all the way around. SDO’s advanced sensors might reveal the complete circuit.
And then…? “It could be the missing piece we need to forecast the whole solar cycle,” says Hathaway.
Stay tuned for that.
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the_Butcher (06:09:07) :
I’ve read that the sun is constantly growing until it gets red and then shrinking before dying.
How come the earth is moving away?
‘Growing’ has to be considered in the right meaning. The Sun is losing mass [that is way the Earth is moving away, but only centimeters per year. At the same time the Sun’s fuel [Hydrogen] is being consumed in the core which means that the thermal pressure needed to hold up the outer layers goes down [less fuel, less energy production, less pressure]. The result is that the core shrinks. Compression heats the core so that the core is now hotter as needed to hold up the Sun. The expands the outer layers and the Sun grows in size [even though it shrinks in mass].
BTW, the internal solar furnace is actually very gentle. The energy production is very small per unit of mass. It takes a million tons of Sun to produce as much energy to run a hair dryer.
Re: JMANON (Mar 13 05:49),
The problem is that eco engineers can come up with lots of ways to insulate us from solar energy but none to replace it.
It would be a shame if they succeeded in shutting us off from the sun just when we are in a cooling spell because taking the particles out of thee atmosphere or removing the sun shade will only restore access to whatever level of solar heating is available, it can do nothing to replace the lost income while thee barriers were up.
It doesn’t help that the AGW campaign has been about persuading us that warm in bad and cold is good. It will be too late to complain about that when we are all blocks of ice.
Wrong. Smart geo engineering could be reversible.
In any case, the only true climate prophecy is that “an ice age is coming” maybe in 100 years, maybe in 1000 but the clockwork of the Vostock data shows that it will come. So, if humans are not blown up in a nuclear catastrophe, or an asteroid does not hit earth, they should be planning for an ice age.
Space shades that would cover enough from the sun’s rays to cool the earth could be reversed as mirrors to focus a second mirrored sun on the earth and increase the insolation, if the ice age comes, if they are judiciously designed .
If a real ice age develops I have been wondering whether covering the moon with aluminum foil might not do the trick, but have not done the calculations.
That means we have to support option 2 and that means we have to pretend that AGW is real and the only cause of warming and we have to pretend that carbons trading is effective and all we need to do.
You are assuming that cap and trade and all that nonsense are harmless. They are not. Returning to the energy consumption of the 1900s for the west will return us to the poverty and hardship of those times. The worst will happen in the third world where people will die of starvation as they already have with the ethanol fiasco that raised the price of corn and reduced people in Haiti to eating mud pies.
The mass media insulate the western world from the terrible conditions in the third world and make it a video game, “so what if 1 billion people starve to death”.
Eugenics at its worst.
George Varros (00:16:27) :
“Dr. Tony Phillips isn’t a forecaster, he is the production editor of SpaceWeather.com I don’t think he embellishes anything but does work with the person behind the story somewhat, to help convey the meaning to the general public. Dr. Phillips is only the messenger…”
If you look at the bottom of everyone of those sensational and inaccurate NASA press releases I highlighted above you’ll see “Author: Dr. Tony Phillips”:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/11jul_solarcycleupdate.htm
As such, Dr. Tony Phillips would be responsible for many of those sensational headlines, the false air of certainty, the use of misleading soundbites, “embellishments” and spinning the facts into awfully broad conclusions that were obviously not justified based on the underling facts. Dr. Tony Phillips does not appear to be a messenger, but rather a chief architect of NASA’s sensational and inaccurate solar press releases.
This reminds me of a book, science fiction, of course. AGW reports could fall into that category, although poorly written ones. Anyway, Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Micheal Flynn. The greens take power, through fear mongering, the world cools dramatically, the only “warm” places have nuclear power stations. The theme throughout “Throw another log on the fire”. Great story.
Since no one else seems to have a better explanation. . .
The extended solar minimum is a clear sign that Sun Gods are angry at Climate Change Scientists for having ignored them and are demanding sacrifices.
Suggestions?
A picture of current theoretical understanding:
http://www.leif.org/research/The-Extended-Cycle.gif
““Fast” in this context means 10 to 15 meters per second (20 to 30 miles per hour). A good bicyclist could easily keep up.”
Yeah, but he’d need one hell of a big waterbottle.
The majority of the longer-lasting sunspots are the ones nearest the equator, and that line is advancing rather quickly. Anything forming poleward of those lines in either hemisphere is weak, doesn’t last long or blinks in and out (swept away in the current).
It’s also showing a behavior pattern that favors one hemisphere over another. That’s the really strange part.
>>>A space deployed sun shade is the most obvious
>>>beginning and that will be phenomenally expensive.
People keep mentioning orbital Sun-shades, but as far as I am aware, a large Sun-shade for the Earth will rapidy become the largest sailingship ever devised, and disappear off to Saturn at a rapid rate of knots. Arthur C Clarke wrote a book about a clipper sailing race around the solar system.
>>I’ve read that the sun is constantly growing until it gets
>>red and then shrinking before dying. How come the
>>earth is moving away?
Its in a period of stasis.
.
My Organic Chemistry instructor told us to document everything in our lab books because is science, failures are often more important than successes. Knowing what you don’t know is the first step in the journey to knowledge.
>>>SO2 emissions are good example. … They don’t know if
>>>they’ve gone down up or stayed the same. i.e. other
>>>countries have increased their emission to filled he void.
Yup – that’s liberal economics and science for you. You cannot have all those filthy factories in the West, polluting the environment, so we shall:
a. close down all Western factories
b. make everyone unemployed
c. backrupt Western nations
d. tranfer the technology and machinery to China
e. give all our money to China, to buy the goods we used to make
f. allow China to output 10x as much SO2 as the West ever did
g. rejoice that we have ‘reduced’ SO2 emissions
h. as an encore, go on to prove that black is white
i. sit back and wait for the civil unrest that will inevitably follow
.
From the perspective of the Sun or Earth climate, we humans have only been observing their method of operation for a tiny amount of time it takes for the full spectrum of operational conditions to be manifest. We have problems with absolute measurement of many parameters now and even less accurate proxy data. Both systems display the signs of deterministic chaos, which makes drawing firm conclusion from our limited observations difficult.
Limited progress has been made, but we should not be too harsh with scientists for not yet finishing the job and developing the ability to predict distant future events.
There are no quick solutions to these sorts of hard problem and it will take much time before wisdom is achieved.
Leif Svalgaard (21:45:36) :
“It is honorable to learn and to change your mind when evidence does not support your ideas. David Hathaway is doing this right [there is no better believer than a reformed sinner 🙂 ].”
I must say I was very impressed with David Hathaway’s interview/mea culpa that used to be found for free here:
http://www.earthfiles.com/news.php?ID=1635&category=Science
until it was buried behind a subscription barrier in the last few weeks.
In the Earthfiles interview Hathaway stated that
“I am writing a paper – it’s on my computer as we speak (laughs) – basically saying that I made a big mistake – myself and Bob Wilson – when we wrote a paper in 2006, suggesting Solar Cycle 24 was going to be a huge cycle based on conditions at that time.”
“But there also were people back at that time saying otherwise. A group of colleagues led by Leif Svalgaard, Ph.D., were looking at the sun’s polar fields and saying even at that point, the sun’s polar fields were significantly weaker than they had been before and those scientists back then predicted it was going to be a small cycle.”
“IS IT FAIR TO SAY THAT THE SUN IS BOTH PECULIAR AND UNPREDICTABLE?”
“Yeah, I’d buy that! (laughs) Most definitely!”
Unfortunately for David Hathaway, the NASA solar press release episode provides a great case study on how scientists and NASA have spun speculation into sweeping erroneous proclamations. It is this type of behavior that is also used to propagate the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming narrative, thus I have to occasionally roll out the NASA sensational solar press release episode to make a point. From what I understand from Leif, David Hathaway is a good scientist, he just got wrapped up with the wrong sort…
wayne (06:36:43) :
is this difference driven solely by the overall sun-size magnetic field? Seems it must, I can’t think of anything else to break the symmetry.
The circulations in the two solar hemispheres are rather independent of each other and such asymmetry is very common. Here is a view of the last five cycles: http://sidc.oma.be/html/wnosuf.html
I’ve noticed before how the southern pole usually has a coronal hole but not the north
Both poles have a coronal hole, but the Sun’s axis is tilted a bit [7.16 degrees], so that we can see the South pole best in March [like now] and the North pole best in September. So if you look in September, the North pole coronal hole will be more prominent:
Just The Facts (07:30:55) :
NASA’s sensational and inaccurate solar press releases.
Whomever it is [and NASA is also guilty], we often see these overhyped press releases [and I tell everybody every time that this is just the usual NASA PR-hype], so we just activate the hype filter and ignore the ‘unprecedented’, ‘never seen before’, ‘scientists are stumped’, ‘breakthrough’, etc filler-phrases.
Sharon (07:34:52) :
demanding sacrifices.
Suggestions?
You a virgin by any chance to qualify? 🙂
Steve Goddard (22:57:55) :
Still waiting for an explanation. How can you get theory right when you can’t even measure within an order of magnitude?
Please. How about most of the physics of the late 19th and early 20th century? They had great theory (and a lot of duds!).
Theory is called that, well, because its a theory. Measurement helps you refine theories that may be a bit hairy. Come on Steve… I generally like your comments, but sometimes you come up with some doozy dumb ones….
rbateman @ur momisugly 7:47:13
I learned from Leif several years ago that the sunspots during the Dalton Minimum were sparse, large and predominately southern hemispheric.
======================
wayne (05:38:44) :
KimW (03:37:25) :
“(…) It seems that the more we know, it shows us how little we know.”
Now there is a truly intelligent statement!
Little things lead to bigger things and bigger things to more.
For all our prying and examination, only one thing can be for sure.
Little things lead to bigger things and bigger things to more.
Leif Svalgaard (06:52:10) :
“We have been down that road before, …….”
Dr. Hathaway says (direct quote):
“We don’t know why this works. The underlying physics is a mystery. But it does work.”
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/21dec_cycle24.htm
and he is probably paid fortune by NASA.
My answer (with no pay) is exactly the same:
“I don’t know why this works. The underlying physics is a mystery. But it does work.”
And you can check the quote. As they say: ”what is good for the goose is good for the gander”
As you can see from here http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC17.htm it works, and it is an excellent agreement with research done by:
Hulburt Center for Space Research (by Wang , Lean and Sheeley)
and Max-Planck Institute ( Solanki et al)
Two relevant papers are:
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1538-4357/577/1/L53/16614.text.html
and
http://www.aanda.org/index.php?option=article&access=standard&Itemid=129&url=/articles/aa/full/2004/42/aa1024/aa1024.right.html
As I said elsewhere, it appears that:
There is more than one way to crack a coconut (…to skin a cat, would be calling for cruelty).
or there is more than one way to the get same result for the mystery of solar cycles.
Steve Goddard (04:52:54) :
Leif,
The silence is deafening:
2006
“The Sun’s Great Conveyor Belt has slowed to a record-low crawl…In recent years, however, the belt has decelerated to 0.75 m/s in the north and 0.35 m/s in the south. “We’ve never seen speeds so low.”
2010
“The Sun’s Great Conveyor Belt has been running at record-high speeds for the past five years…The Great Conveyor Belt is one of the biggest things in the whole solar system and by human standards it moves with massive slowness. “Fast” in this context means 10 to 15 meters per second ”
His graph shows the peak in 2006, right when the he previously claimed the record minimum. This isn’t an issue of “theory” or “changing his mind”, rather it is an indication of a much more serious fundamental data collection problem.
~
Could we add to that the anomalous, somewhat anemic, solar southern hemisphere from cycle 23 max thru now and continues to be slowwwer.
Did we clip an interstellar cloudlette in the southern heliosphere and clog up the intake/output, some sort of heated up back pressure or what? Hit a cloud slow down your system and watch for the consequences to your system. Make sure it’s a dustier, dirtier, faster cloud you clip. You’d see a trickle down effect throughout the entire system starting in the outer bubble. What does low level sectional descreening look like in it’s infancy?
Did that article state it was a surface slowing, not an undercurrent? Will have to read it again.
We’ll sign this,
Group W bench
We could be guilty of litterin’ and causing a disturbance.
I’m pleased to see that several commenters remember Hatchway’s trail of solar pronouncements as do I (“the conveyor has slowed; the conveyor has speeded up; the sun is behaving most abnormally; there is nothing unusual about the sun’s current behavior”). Such an incoherent record, presented in each case with such glib confidence, would in most arenas of human endeavor lead to suspicions of mental instability. Does Mr. Hathaway by any chance commune with the “saucer people”?
The problem with science is that it thinks the sun and planet recharges itself somehow and the rotational show down is caused by other factors.
The sun and planets are already infused with rotational energy and as the mass is used, it has to slow.
The mixture of gases and mass makes for a very interesting adjustment of rotation forcing mass to the outer perimenter and leaving gases to the inner perimeter.
This then is totally contrary to our theory on what the core of our planet is made of.
The suns core is super compressed gases so why is our planets core any different?
We have density and atmospheric pressure that gives us gravity but under the surface is a whole different set of rules.
Ref – KimW (03:37:25) :
“Perhaps the Sun is a barely perceptible variable star on a scale of centuries ?.”
_______________________
Go on.. I’m listening..
You’re not alone in your wundering;-)
It would probably be for the better if scientist were quiet for a while now — And concentrate on science.
What we know, you could write a book. What we don’t know, you could fill a really really large library.
Here it is, upper belt faster than lower belt where they supposedly can track speed by sunspot. How are we tracking lower belt speed in the southern solar hemisphere then?
~~
The second surprise has to do with the bottom of the Conveyor Belt.
SOHO can only clock the motions of the visible top layer. The bottom is hidden by ~200,000 kilometers of overlying plasma. Nevertheless, an estimate of its speed can be made by tracking sunspots.
“Sunspots are supposedly rooted to the bottom of the belt,” says Hathaway. “So the motion of sunspots tells us how fast the belt is moving down there.”
He’s done that—plotted sunspot speeds vs. time since 1996—and the results don’t make sense. “While the top of the conveyor belt has been moving at record-high speed, the bottom seems to be moving at record-low speed. Another contradiction.”
Could it be that sunspots are not rooted to the bottom of the Conveyor Belt, after all? “That’s one possibility” he notes. “Sunspots could be moving because of dynamo waves or some other phenomenon not directly linked to the belt.”
What researchers really need is a good look deep inside the sun. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, launched in February 2010, will provide that when its instruments come online later this year. SDO is able to map the sun’s interior using a technique called helioseismology. SOHO can do the same thing, but not well enough to trace the Great Conveyor Belt all the way around. SDO’s advanced sensors might reveal the complete circuit.
And then…? “It could be the missing piece we need to forecast the whole solar cycle,” says Hathaway.
~~
Leif Svalgaard (06:52:10) :
Link for the sun’s Polar Field formula details is:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC2.htm