From NORTHUMBRIA UNIVERSITY and the “solar constant” department
New research undertaken at Northumbria University, Newcastle shows that the Sun’s magnetic waves behave differently than currently believed.
Their findings have been reported in the latest edition of the prominent journal, Nature Astronomy.
After examining data gathered over a 10-year period, the team from Northumbria’s Department of Mathematics, Physics and Electrical Engineering found that magnetic waves in the Sun’s corona – its outermost layer of atmosphere – react to sound waves escaping from the inside of the Sun.
These magnetic waves, known as Alfvénic waves, play a crucial role in transporting energy around the Sun and the solar system. The waves were previously thought to originate at the Sun’s surface, where boiling hydrogen reaches temperatures of 6,000 degrees and churns the Sun’s magnetic field.
However, the researchers have found evidence that the magnetic waves also react – or are excited – higher in the atmosphere by sound waves leaking out from the inside of the Sun.
The team discovered that the sound waves leave a distinctive marker on the magnetic waves. The presence of this marker means that the Sun’s entire corona is shaking in a collective manner in response to the sound waves. This is causing it to vibrate over a very clear range of frequencies.
This newly-discovered marker is found throughout the corona and was consistently present over the 10-year time-span examined. This suggests that it is a fundamental constant of the Sun – and could potentially be a fundamental constant of other stars.
The findings could therefore have significant implications for our current ideas about how magnetic energy is transferred and used in stellar atmospheres.
Dr Richard Morton, the lead author of the report and a senior lecturer at Northumbria University, said:
“The discovery of such a distinctive marker – potentially a new constant of the Sun – is very exciting. We have previously always thought that the magnetic waves were excited by the hydrogen at the surface, but now we have shown that they are excited by these sound waves. This could lead to a new way to examine and classify the behaviour of all stars under this unique signature. Now we know the signature is there, we can go looking for it on other stars.
“The Sun’s corona is over one hundred times hotter than its surface and energy stemming from the Alfvénic waves is believed to be responsible for heating the corona to a temperature of around one million degrees. The Alfvénic waves are also responsible for heating and accelerating powerful solar wind from the Sun which travels through the solar system. These winds travel at speeds of around a million miles per hour. They also affect the atmosphere of stars and planets, impacting on their own magnetic fields, and cause phenomena such as aurora.”
Dr Morton added:
“Our evidence shows that the Sun’s internal acoustic oscillations play a significant role in exciting the magnetic Alfvénic waves. This can give the waves different properties and suggests that they are more susceptible to an instability, which could lead to hotter and faster solar winds.”
The research was funded by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council and the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research. It was undertaken by Dr Morton and Professor James McLaughlin from Northumbria’s Solar Physics research group, together with Dr Micah Weberg, who recently moved from Northumbria to Washington DC’s Naval Research Laboratory.
Dr Morton and Professor McLaughlin are currently working with NASA to analyse images of the Sun which were taken by NASA’s High-Resolution Coronal Imager, Hi-C.
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Their paper A basal contribution from p-modes to the Alfvenic wave flux in the Sun’s corona is published in Nature Astronomy. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0668-9
Via Eurekalert
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With cycles so slow and observations so short, why is it reasonable to suspect there is a pattern happening here at all?
Red noise perhaps?
One “acoustic” on the sun was a song by Frankie Laine, that included:
“That lucky old sun has nothing to do but roll around heaven all day.”
🙂
In terms of temperature, the spectral irradiance from the sun at the top of the earth’s atmosphere is fairly well known. This irradiance is strictly massless photons should include all turbocharging of the effective radiative temperature of the sun by all known and unknown processes.
Electromagnetic radiation gets red shifted from the sun to the earth by 1/92 million miles squared. A Planck curve for 5250K matches or overstates the observed irradiance except for the bluer parts of the visible spectrum, where it falls quite short.
The quarks and electrons of the solar wind are not part of this irradiance, but are more probably dissociated from molecules at higher temperature.
The problem becomes analogous to determining the effective radiative temperature (and altitude) of the earth. The earth, and Javier’s whale, creates sound waves too.
So we have two Swedes here, Arrhenius and Hannes Alfvén (Leif sic the Swedish prime minister Stefan decided to omit the ´ in Löfvén but not Hannes !!) (Nobel prize in Physics 1970) Wikipedia in english claims he was married for 67 years but then he would have married at 17-18 and his wife being 15-16 so I tend to believe the Swedish Wikipedia more: They were married for 57 years 1935-92 … Hannes uncle was the rather famous Swedish composer Hugo Alfvén . His “Midsommarvaka” Midsummer Vigil was the first Swedish recording in Stereo! (1954)
I think there might be some things about the sun we don’t know already and bedbugs are not just annoying, maybe…??
Only Swedes I remember were Agnetha and Anni-Frid, but that was some time ago.
In the 19th century, Lord Kelvin calculated that a molten Earth would cool and solidify in around 100 million years. From this he concluded that Earth is not more than 100 million years old because Earth’s interior is still molten. But geological evidence suggested Earth is over a billion years old. The development of radioisotope dating in the 20th century proved that Earth is around 4.5 billion years old. It solved the puzzle of Earth’s age but it raised another puzzle: why didn’t Earth’s interior cool and become solid?
The standard theory of geophysics states that radioactive elements in Earth’s core and friction heating from mantle convection kept Earth’s interior hot and molten. Geophysicists around the world, do the calculations. Radioactivity is hopelessly inadequate. Heating by mantle convection is a perpetual motion machine of the second kind (one that violates the second law of thermodynamics). Mantle convection is caused by heat in the lower mantle driving fluids to rise. The standard theory says this heat is caused by mantle convection. This is circular causation. Convection is both cause and effect of heat. Since it is causing itself, the process will never stop: a perpetual motion machine. No such thing because heat dissipates in reality. If we consider heat dissipation, Earth’s interior would cool and we’re back to the puzzle why it’s still hot and molten.
To explain this mystery, I invented my X-magneto theory. Earth does not cause its own heating. There is an external cause and it is the solar magnetic field. Earth’s core is made up of iron. However, since the core’s temperature is above the Curie temperature for iron (1043 K), it exhibits paramagnetism rather than ferromagnetism. In paramagnetism, the atomic magnetic dipoles can rotate and align to the applied magnetic field, which in this case are the solar magnetic field and geomagnetic field.
The solar magnetic field reverses every 11-year cycle. Thus its orientation with respect to the geomagnetic field changes over time. The effect of the two magnetic fields and paramagnetism result in a magnetic moment displacement in Earth’s core. The strong gravitational force in the core acts as a normal force to the displacement. This induces a resistance to motion or friction, a force that is opposite to the direction of torque of the magnetic moment. Friction generates heat and this is the source of geothermal heat. The physical mechanism is described by my Thermomagneto Equations:
X = r arctan (B/Bc sin w)
F = π r^2 P
q = X u F a N
Where: X is magnetic moment displacement; r is atomic radius of Fe; B is solar magnetic field; Bc is geomagnetic field at Earth’s core; w is angular velocity of solar magnetic field; F is gravitational force per atom; P is pressure at core; q is friction heat rate; u is coefficient of dynamic friction; a is portion of atoms susceptible to paramagnetism; N is number of Fe atoms in core
The magnetic fields are vectors. Hence, vector addition is performed to obtain the angular displacement. The atomic radius is the torque arm. The arc length is the displacement due to torque. Solving the Thermomagneto Equations give a friction heat rate that approximates the geothermal heat flow of 4.4 E+13 watts. The heat rate is slightly less than the geothermal heat flow since the core is cooling at a slow rate. It is estimated the inner core solidified about 500 million years ago. It took four billion years to solidify. The core will eventually cool but it will take billions of years.
Trivia: The name X-magneto comes from my Thermomagneto Equations where X is the symbol for magnetic moment displacement. Magneto comes from solar magnetic field that causes the magnetic moment displacement. That’s the official version. The personal version is I named it after Magneto of X-men :-0
I guess the phrase “The quiet Sun” has a new meaning to me! Very interesting and incalculably over my head….
I can “See” how the Suns magnetic field can interact with the metal core of the Earth, and result in a electrical generater, and just as with a fossal fuel generater there is a lot of heat, which we then cool down.
But as the Earth has a semi solid crust, its a very good insulator and thus keeps the heat in. Simple really.
MJE
Dr. Deanster
At the very least, CO2 being a molecule that can absorb energy,
Henry says
no it cannot. You donot understand the principle of the GH effect. It does not ‘absorb’ energy.
I can easily prove from simple experiments that what happens is this: in the wavelengths areas where absorption takes place, the molecule starts acting like a little mirror, the strength of which depends on the amount of absorption taking place inside the molecule. Because the molecule is like a perfect sphere, 62,5% of a certain amount of light (radiation) is send back in the direction where it came from. This is the warming or cooling effect of a gas hit by radiation.
Unfortunately, in their time, Tyndall and Arrhenius could not see the whole picture of the spectrum of a gas which is why they got stuck on seeing only the warming properties of a gas.
If people would understand this principle, they would not singularly identify green house gases (GHG’s) by pointing at the areas in the 5-20 um region (where earth emits pre-dominantly) but they would also look in the area 0-5 um (where the sun emits pre-dominantly) for possible cooling effects.
I also explained this here:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/02/11/evidence-for-a-new-fundamental-constant-of-the-sun/#comment-2624799