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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

• Re:Obvious cause (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 05 2019, @07:37PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 05 2019, @07:37PM (#810385)

  Forbes astrophysicist, Ethan Siegel summarizes the new normal:

  That guy is no better than the inquisition, please do not link to him:

  The blogger (@StartsWithABang) contacted @scilogscom on January 24 by replying to a 15-day old tweet that announced our blog’s move to the new domain. He tweeted “Bummed that @scilogscom is in the business of promoting contrarian scientist viewpoints.”, and asks the SciLogs.com community manager (@notscientific) “[Why] are you allowing @scilogscom to promote contrarian voices that undermine public understanding of [science]?”, adding “You have taken on “Dark Matter Crisis” blog, whose mission is to undermine all of physical cosmology & promote MOND.”

          The two agreed to discuss the issue via email, with the blogger adding that he was “*personally* worried that you are promoting clicks & false controversy over quality science content”, and states that he is “very, VERY disappointed about this move that @scilogscom has made”.

          By now the SciLogs.com community manager has explained to us what happened after these tweets. He and the publishing director responsible for SciLogs.com unfortunately assumed that the blogger’s criticism was justified. They decided to close our blog without conferring with others or asking us for a statement. After we complained about the discontinuation, they performed an internal investigation, which involved reaching out to astrophysicists and other people, and have realized that discontinuing our blog was a big mistake. We attribute SciLogs.com’s poor judgement to two factors: neither the community manager nor the publishing director has an (astro)physical background, it was the first time that SciLogs.com had experienced an attack against one of its blogs.

  https://darkmattercrisis.wordpress.com/2013/03/08/the-dark-matter-crisis-continues-on-the-difficulties-of-communicating-controversial-science/ [wordpress.com]

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