I visited Mt Wilson on the weekend and took the tour there. One part of the tour took us inside the 150ft solar tower operated by UCLA. I was surprised to see that they recorded sunspot activity by sketching diagrams by hand.
And they put them on the web. If you want to see "puzzling" lack of sunspot activity, here it is:
I hope this is some masochistic exercise forced on young astronomers to make them appreciate what their forbears had to do before they're let loose on the computers.
I'm also puzzled as to why the date is logged as 11 December, since it's the 11th of November.
That doesn't in itself explain why they wouldn't be generating these diagrams automatically nowadays. Perhaps nobody's written a sunspot-finding computer vision algorithm that consistently produces the results they want, in a format vaguely compatible with the traditional drawings?
He says: he likes the tradition, this convergence of science and art.
"The value," he says, "is not so much in the individual achievement but in maintaining the daily record."
However, the telescope's annual budget of $250,000, cobbled together with grants from NASA and the National Science Foundation, runs out in the spring, and Ulrich says odds of getting more money from NASA are long.
Edit - previous speculation I wrote: Hmmm.. maybe Steve Padilla wrote it as 12-11-2013 (like we write it in South America) instead of 11-12-2013 like in the U.S. ?
I said '11 Dec 2013' so I don't think it's euro/US date format confusion (and I'm Euro myself, so I wholeheartedly approve of putting the mday before the month like every other sane person).
In particular, the Maunder minimum was a period of very low solar activity in the 17th century which contributed to the Little Ice Age. The drop in temperature impacted agricultural yields around the globe. [1]
That said, my professor would say that it's too early to infer much from this cycle's low sunspot number. The solar dynamo is very unpredictable in general, and quite possibly chaotic. Next cycle could be above average and that wouldn't shock anybody in solar physics.
Though the record of sun sunspots is not a long record and with that this could very well be normal only outside the sample range we currently have and goes against all patterns currently cleaned.
Also in a probably unrelated pattern, the northern hemisphere had fewer hurricanes than normal this season.
One aspect that does add to my curiosity is that the northern pole has moved and the southern one has not, I was unaware that magnetic poles moved independantly - though no mention of monopoles. So I'm somewhat curious too this and hopefully somebody will enlighten.
It's not the "most powerful hurricane ever known", it's ~30th in pressure since 50s, it only had the highest speed at landfall due to a conversion error
I'm sorry but roughly 200 years of data is not nearly enough to begin to predict any sort of cycles the 4.5 billion year old Sun has.
The article mentions 11 year cycles between polar changes... since it hasn't happened this year, this article is based around 19 data points... That's the last 19 data points of the available 409,090,909 11-year increments...
Science doesn't work like that. We've only observed a tiny proportion of the Moon's orbits around the Earth, but we can still predict an eclipse of the Sun and we know that it's not going to crash into the Earth tomorrow.
Why not learn a bit about the subject? Stars really are fascinating!
I think your example is not a good one and the premise you meant to have it support is flawed.
Calculating the orbit of an object in space is well understood and several orders of magnitude less complicated than the relatively poorly understood processes that occur in the sun.
As the person you replied to said, it is hubris to think that after a few hundred years of studying a 4 billion year old dynamic object that we can make such precise predictions about it. The fact that scientists seem to be baffled by the sun's current behavior should make this point obvious.
> it is hubris to think that after a few hundred years of studying a 4 billion year old dynamic object
I'm afraid you missed my point: the age of the object is irrelevant. That's why I was talking about the Moon which is also billions of years old.
We don't predict how things will behave, simply based on a number of observations and then extrapolating (well, not if we have any choice). Instead we try to understand the underlying physical principles that cause the behaviour in the first place and make predictions based on that.
The hubris is from you assuming you have a better understanding of the state of knowledge of the Sun than the people who actually study it. They know far better than you what we do and do not know.
I think you may have missed my point. The comment I was replying to essentially said, "If we can predict A with little information then we can predict B with little information". My point was that this is not necessarily true and certainly not true in this instance. After all, scientists are frequently wrong about sunspot activity predictions and rarely wrong about where the moon will be at any particular time of the day / year.
The comment I responded to also had a needlessly condescending tone to the OP of "Science doesn't work like that...Why not learn a bit about the subject?" which I also objected to.
Given the tools we have to detect the sun's 'doings' today are magnanimously more sophisticated than 200 years ago, could it be that 200 years ago several fluctuations were missed because the overall balance still remained throughout the cycles?
If I remember correctly, the sunspot record is fairly accurate since we've had telescopes (~400 years ago), since they can last several months, and there aren't that many of them.
>"Sunspots—often broader in diameter than Earth—mark areas of intense magnetic force that brew disruptive solar storms."
>"...diameter than Earth..."
Diameter larger than earth?
Did they stop editing the wall street journal?
Since most of our GPS and cellular devices have been developed and deployed during a period of unusually weak solar electromagnetic activity, I've been wondering and worrying about how big of a disaster is waiting to happen when the sun returns to "normal."
That would seem to fly in the face of what the article said, specifically the 2003 solar storm and this:
"Several solar scientists speculated that the sun may be returning to a more relaxed state after an era of unusually high activity that started in the 1940s."
Would you mind elaborating on the weak period of solar activity?
Even if GPS stopped working, given some time we could work around it. There'd be some issues in the short term, but GPS is used because it is easier than inertial navigation systems, (thankfully) not because it's the only choice.
It's not just easier, GPS is vastly more reliable and accurate than almost any other method of navigation.
So much so that it's starting to be relied on in many industries. For example, airplanes are starting to move away from a radar based method of air traffic control to a GPS based system. Every airplane will simply continuously transmit its GPS coordinates as part of its transponder message. From this you can create a highly accurate map of where every plane is, except much more accurate than with radar.
From the comments: "No mention of the four comets currently in the Solar System. I'm no genius, but don't you think four electromagnetic balls of energy might have an effect on the Sun's magnetic field."
(In case anyone here isn't aware, comets are basically big balls of ice, not "electromagnetic balls of energy")
This comment makes me think that there is remaining ground to be covered in the "online commenting" field. Youtube comments, for all they are made fun of, do a decent job of allowing video authors to respond to particularly inane or confused comments and provide clarification. Those comments are typically then stuck to the top of the comment section, allowing other commenters to see the correction.
Perhaps a commenting system that allows scientific educators of various sorts to single out comments and write highly visible responses to them could 1) improve the state of online commenting, 2) increase scientific literacy among the general public.
I used to think newspaper comment systems were going to create more informed citizenry and that everyone would engage in Adult Discussions of Serious Issues. I tirelessly evangelized the gospel of reader participation at every opportunity.
I was catastrophically wrong. Most people are idiots, and idiots like to travel in packs. Sorry about that.
Small correction, but I can't resist: Comets, like most matter, are electronically balanced electromagnetic energy balls, i.e. have no net charge* but plenty of charges. ;)
* Of course they can pick up a charge from, e.g. collecting solar wind... I'm not an astrophysicist so I can't say how big it would be.
I would donate to a crowd-funded thing that did that.
A scientific rapid response unit - finding and correcting errors in online comments, with links back to a blog that has a nice easy to understand article about the subject, with clear diagrams and examples.
The WSJ comment community is a) right wing and b) terminally stupid. I am not trying to suggest that the two are equivalent, but whenever there's a story like this 80% of the comments consist of dismissing global warming as a hoax.
Indeed the orioginal article comments do have a somewhat colourful selection from the walks of human life. Like yourself I like to read the comments and the linked article original comments before dipping in, but in this case nothing was easily added to the conversation, though I saw no spam or sdrawkcab level posts.
And they put them on the web. If you want to see "puzzling" lack of sunspot activity, here it is:
http://obs.astro.ucla.edu/cur_drw.html