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Calm Before The Storm?

September 26, 2008

Are we seeing the peendulm swing from the perspective of sun spot activity? The eleven year cycle of the sun says that the PEAK of the current cycle (#24) will come in 2012. In a year and seson of seemingly extremes in everything from global warming to global cooling and financial crisis after another what less could we expect from that ball of fire in the sky known as the Sun!

Who Wants Cheaper Auto Insurance?

Of the many potential catastrophic events that are possible in 2012, what the sun does affect many!

So, it’s of note when the intensity of the sun’s million-mile-per-hour solar wind has dropped to its lowest levels since accurate records began half a century ago, scientists say. Measurements of the cosmic blasts of radiation, ejected from the sun’s upper atmosphere, were made with the Ulysses spacecraft, a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).

So, what’s up with that?

The solar wind “nflates a protective bubble, or heliosphere, around the solar system, which protects the inner planets against the radiation from other stars, said Dave McComas, Ulysses’ solar wind principal investigator and senior executive director at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. “With the solar wind at an all-time low, there is an excellent chance the heliosphere will diminish in size and strength,” said Ed Smith, NASA’s Ulysses project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “If that occurs, more galactic cosmic rays will make it into the inner part of our solar system,” added Smith.

Seems as though we’re damned one way or we’re damned the other.

Scientists say the weakening of solar wind appears to be due to changes in the sun’s magnetic field, but the causes of these changes are unknown.

The weakened solar activity can also be beneficial because it slows satellites around the Earth, allowing them to remain in orbit longer. The sun normally experiences 11-year-cycles between periods of great activity and lesser activity. Our Ulysses mission’s recent results, published in Geophysical Research Letters, show that “We are in a period of minimal activity that has stretched on longer than anyone anticipated.”

The Ulysses mission was the first project to survey the space environment over the sun’s poles. The data the spacecraft has collected has profoundly changed the way scientists view our nearest star and its effects on the Earth. The spacecraft has traveled more than 539 million kilometers in more than 18 years, almost four times its expected lifetime.

Let the 2012 intrigue build! :-)

Written by Ernie · Filed Under 2012 

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