By Dr. Tony Phillips 99 years ago this week, people around the world woke up to some unusual headlines. “Telegraph Service Prostrated, Comet Not to Blame” — declared the Los…
Category: Solar
Solar Cycle 25 Has Started
Guest post by David Archibald The heliospheric current sheet has flattened meaning that Solar Cycle 24 is over and we are now in Solar Cycle 25. Figure 1: Heliospheric current…
IPCC Politics and Solar Variability
By Andy May This post is about an important new paper by Nicola Scafetta, Richard Willson, Jae Lee and Dong Wu (Scafetta, Willson and Lee, et al. 2019) on the…
Solar energy tracker powers down after 17 years
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center After nearly two decades, the Sun has set for NASA’s SOlar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE), a mission that continued and advanced the agency’s 40-year record…
How ESA-NASA’s Solar Orbiter Beats the Heat
From NASA Feb. 4, 2020 When Solar Orbiter launches on its journey to the Sun, there’s one key piece of engineering making this ESA-NASA mission possible: the heat shield. Seeking…
A Solar Science Timeline – sunspots, cycles, and solar wind
Humankind has studied the Sun for millennia. Ancient Babylonians recorded eclipses on stone tablets. Renaissance scientists peered through telescopes, tracking sunspots. Eventually we took to space, and the first satellites captured solar particles…
Sunspots, Verse 25
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach [See update at the end] I started out as a true believer that sunspots (or something that changes in sync with sunspots, like heliomagnetism, cosmic…
Spot The Quakes
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Over in the Twitterverse, where I appear as @WEschenbach, in a discussion someone made the following comment: Solar minimum affects periodicity of volcanic activity. Year…
Reverse Polarity Sunspots appear on the Sun – ending a 39 day stretch of spotless days
Dr. Tony Phillips writes: A new solar cycle is coming. Today, two sunspots emerged on the solar disk. Their reversed magnetic polarity marks them as members of new Solar Cycle…
Solar Update December 2019
David Archibald We are well into the Solar Cycle 24/25 minimum but 24 may not have ended yet. A solar cycle isn’t over until the heliospheric current sheet has flattened.…
NASA’s SDO Sees New Kind of Magnetic Explosion on Sun
from NASA Dec. 17, 2019 NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory has observed a magnetic explosion the likes of which have never been seen before. In the scorching upper reaches of the…
Deep solar minimum on the verge of an historic milestone
Guest post by Paul Dorian Daily observations of the number of sunspots since 1 January 1900 according to Solar Influences Data Analysis Center (SIDC). The thin blue line indicates the…
Quiet sun sets new record for spotless days
As of November 1st, the current stretch of days without any observable sunspots in solar cycle 24 has reached a total of 228 spotless days in 2019 so far That’s 75% of…
25 for 25
Guest post by David Archibald Back on March 7, 2006, the National Science Foundation issued a press release predicting that the amplitude of Solar Cycle 24 would be “30 to…
Potential role of low solar activity this winter as solar minimum deepens and the wide-ranging impacts of increasing cosmic rays
Guest post by Paul Dorian *Potential role of low solar activity this winter as solar minimum deepens and the wide-ranging impacts of increasing cosmic rays* The sun is blank again…
Plasma flow near sun’s surface explains sunspots, other solar phenomena
University of Washington For 400 years people have tracked sunspots, the dark patches that appear for weeks at a time on the sun’s surface. They have observed but been unable…
This kind of solar storm could be devastating in today’s world…”The Carrington Event” of 1859
Guest post by Paul Dorian Overview The sun continues to be very quiet and it has been without sunspots this year 70% of the time as we approach what is…
Solar Update July 2019
Guest Post by David Archibald The two major items of interest are the likely month of minimum in the Solar Cycle 24 – 25 transition and the likely amplitude of…
Sun spotless for 33 days straight – airline travelers getting dosed with up to 70 times more radiation [than at sea level]
Are we in a solar grand minimum? We’ve seen this before, but now predictions are for an extremely weak solar cycle ahead. Today is the summer solstice in the northern…
A record of the sun left on the moon
From NASA Goddard: Summary: The Sun’s rotation rate in its first billion years is unknown. Yet, this spin rate affected solar eruptions, influencing the evolution of life. A team of…
Scientists tackle a burning question: When will our quiet sun turn violent?
From Science Mag A violent, active sun, as seen in ultraviolet light in October 2014—near solar maximum in its 11-year solar cycle. As the sun approaches solar minimum, scientists are…
Three solar storms headed for Earth
NOAA forecasters say there is a 55% to 60% chance of geomagnetic storms on May 15th and 16th when a series of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) could hit Earth’s magnetic…
SVENSMARK’s Force Majeure, The Sun’s Large Role in Climate Change
GUEST: HENRIK SVENSMARK By H. Sterling Burnett By bombarding the Earth with cosmic rays and being a driving force behind cloud formations, the sun plays a much larger role on climate…
Evidence of the 11 year Solar Cycle in the Stratosphere
This is not a novel result, for example: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/03/30/tools-to-spot-the-spots/ Nevertheless, this is a solid analysis and exercise in citizen science.~ctm By: Leron Wells During my early teenage years as an…
