SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
One of the big questions in solar physics is why the sun's activity follows a regular cycle of 11 years. Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), an independent German research institute, now present new findings, indicating that the tidal forces of Venus, Earth and Jupiter influence the solar magnetic field, thus governing the solar cycle.
[...] To accomplish this result, the scientists systematically compared historical observations of solar activity from the last thousand years with planetary constellations, statistically proving that the two phenomena are linked. "There is an astonishingly high level of concordance: what we see is complete parallelism with the planets over the course of 90 cycles," said Frank Stefani, lead author of the study. "Everything points to a clocked process."
[...] Besides influencing the 11-year cycle, planetary tidal forces may also have other effects on the sun. For example, it is also conceivable that they change the stratification of the plasma in the transition region between the interior radiative zone and the outer convection zone of the sun (the tachocline) in such a way that the magnetic flux can be conducted more easily. Under those conditions, the magnitude of activity cycles could also be changed, as was once the case with the Maunder Minimum, when there was a strong decline in solar activity for a longer phase.
https://phys.org/news/2019-05-corroborates-planetary-tidal-solar.html
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday August 25 2019, @06:38PM (1 child)
But you will still need to validate the readings. It's extremely important that there be overlap, or you lose a lot of certainty when you do comparisons. These are instruments working at the edge of what we can do, and while you can depend on them to be "about the same", you need to calculate correction factors by comparing them against the instruments that you've already been collecting data from.
So keeping the tools that you've got working, working longer is a *real* benefit. Or, of course, overlapping the readings.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 25 2019, @07:23PM
I would like TESS, Hubble, etc. to work indefinitely. But it remains to be seen if there is willpower to make that happen even with ultra low launch costs. TESS cost under $300 million total. What will servicing it cost (manned or robotic)?
This is what TESS is collecting over the first two years. [wikipedia.org] There is about 8 months left. The mission will obviously be extended, but we don't know how they will choose to operate going forward. As you can see, some of the zones only get 27 days of observation time out of 2 years. So the overlap may be less important than starting fresh and getting continuous coverage of parts of the sky.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]