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A Month Without Sunspots: February 2019

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday March 05 2019, @10:11AM   
from the have-to-wear-shades dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A MONTH WITHOUT SUNSPOTS: There are 28 days in February. This year, all 28 of them were spotless. The sun had no sunspots for the entire month of Feb. 2019.

The last time a full calendar month passed without a sunspot was August 2008. At the time, the sun was in the deepest Solar Minimum of the Space Age. Now a new Solar Minimum is in progress and it is shaping up to be similarly deep. So far this year, the sun has been blank 73% of the time--the same as 2008.

Solar Minimum is a normal part of the solar cycle. Every ~11 years, sunspot counts drop toward zero. Dark cores that produce solar flares and CMEs vanish from the solar disk, leaving the sun blank for long stretches of time. These minima have been coming and going with regularity since the sunspot cycle was discovered in 1859.

However, not all Solar Minima are alike. The last one in 2008-2009 surprised observers with its depth and side-effects. Sunspot counts dropped to a 100-year low; the sun dimmed by 0.1%; Earth's upper atmosphere collapsed, allowing space junk to accumulate; the pressure of the solar wind flagged while cosmic rays (normally repelled by solar wind) surged to Space Age highs. All these things are happening again.

http://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=01&month=03&year=2019

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Original Submission

• Sunspots and economic activity Sunspots and economic activity (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 05 2019, @01:35PM (2 children)

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 05 2019, @01:35PM (#810233)

  The last time this happened was just before the Great Recession.

  Among economists, "sunspots" are a sort of running joke, sometimes used as a "fudge factor" in economic models to account for unexplained extrinsic variables. This dates back to this guy, who found a correlation between solar activity and the business cycle:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stanley_Jevons#Practical_economics [wikipedia.org]

  I wonder if he was onto something.

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• Re:Sunspots and economic activity (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 05 2019, @01:46PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 05 2019, @01:46PM (#810237)

  Future prove past:

  In an inquiry which I made regarding the weight of the sterling, average grains of wheat of crop 1876 from the south of England were found, in an air-dry condition, to weigh as follows: Talavera, 1.01 gr. troy; Chidham white, 76; Sherrifl's bearded, 86; Kessingland red, 92; Nursery red, .76; Trump white, .81; Red rivet, 1.00; Lammas red, .89; Hunter's white, .75.

  https://www.nature.com/articles/019196b0 [nature.com]

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• Re:Sunspots and economic activity (Score: 3, Insightful) by istartedi on Tuesday March 05 2019, @07:27PM

  by istartedi (123) on Tuesday March 05 2019, @07:27PM (#810380) Journal

  To the extent that sunspots are linked to climate, an economic link would not be out to lunch at all. Sun spots less, climate disrupted, agricultural yields decline, farmers and their consumers have hard times, foreclosures rise, they sell stocks to pay their bills, Boom! Wall Street's in trouble too.

  --
  Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.

  Parent