| Title | The Sun is Quieter than Normal, but Don't Panic | |
| Date | Wednesday March 13 2019, @09:00AM | |
| Author | mrpg | |
| Topic | ||
| from the SPF50 dept. | ||
The sun is quiet ... very quiet.
In February, for the first time since August 2008, the sun went an entire month without any sunspots.
Sunspots are cooler regions of the sun. How many appear on the sun's surface depends on what cycle the sun is in. Every 11 years our star goes through a maximum, followed by a minimum (the entire magnetic cycle of the sun, when the poles flip, is 22 years).
Over the past three decades, the sun has been consistently dropping in activity. Maximum has been quieter than is typical; minimum has been particularly quiet. And this has caused some to make the false assumption that, as a result, Earth is going to cool.
It all stems from an incident that took place between 1645 and 1715, called the Maunder Minimum, where sunspots all but disappeared. This coincided with the "Little Ice Age" that stretched from 1500 to 1850 in the northern hemisphere. In England, the Thames River froze over; Viking settlers abandoned Greenland.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/solar-activity-1.5049337
| Links |
printed from SoylentNews, The Sun is Quieter than Normal, but Don't Panic on 2024-04-20 05:19:47