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
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 05 2019, @03:15PM
surely there's a correlation between earthquakes and sunspots and a correlation between radioactive particle half-life and sunspots?
too fuzzy in math right now, but what's the distance between two sphere magnets (unity strength, say 1 Tesla and unity size, say 1 meter) so that attraction drops below the plank length? obviously you cannot move in between and since the field strength is depend (by definition) on time, space and uhm .. errr ... well those two and maybe elementary charge (1e) there must be a distance where you can call truly separate (magnetically they don't know anything about each other). it's like the "schwarzschild radius" but using plank length instead?
i doubt that the suns magneticfield and and earth magneticfield are separate.
also i am guessing that if one magnet is massively huge but has a relatively weak magnetic field (tesla/mass) but the gravitational field of it is
enough to capture the second magnet which is mass-wise tiny but relatively strong in the magenticfield business (tesla/mass) that the mini-magnet can have a "3-punch" combo knockout effect on the orbital center ... or suemthing :)