NASA Can Haz Sunspot?

Remember about a year ago when we were talking about how the Sun might be dying? It had something to do with what's called the solar minimum, a normal part of the Sun's cycle where it goes into a period of low activity. The opposite is naturally the solar maximum, which is late and forecast to start any time and be awesome and crazy huge. It takes about 11 years to go through the whole cycle.

In 2008 and 2009, solar activity dropped to a 100-year-low, an absolutely epic minimum—leading to the cooling and collapsing of Earth's upper atmosphere, and a dangerous super-abundance of cosmic rays in space—which sparked a New Scientist story that suggested that Sun was dying and had lost its ability to make sunspots.

In the science journal Nature today, NASA has a solid answer as to why the Sun seems to be sputtering, thanks to a new computer model. The Sun has a sort of internal conveyor belt that cycles scorching plasma from the internal guts of the Sun to the surface. Well, for some reason, it's slowed way down, and all those sunspots are down there waiting to circulate back out. I don’t know what that means as far as the sun dying.

From NASA:

While Solar Max is relatively brief, lasting a few years punctuated by episodes of violent flaring, over and done in days, Solar Minimum can grind on for many years. The famous Maunder Minimum of the 17th century lasted 70 years and coincided with the deepest part of Europe’s Little Ice Age. Researchers are still struggling to understand the connection. One thing is clear: During long minima, strange things happen. In 2008-2009, the sun's global magnetic field weakened and the solar wind subsided. Cosmic rays normally held at bay by the sun's windy magnetism surged into the inner solar system. During the deepest solar minimum in a century, ironically, space became a more dangerous place to travel. At the same time, the heating action of UV rays normally provided by sunspots was absent, so Earth's upper atmosphere began to cool and collapse. Space junk stopped decaying as rapidly as usual and started accumulating in Earth orbit. And so on….

We now return you to staring at this awesome fucking solar flare.

The Missing Northern Lights and Our Ailing Sun

How Our Solar System Might Look to Aliens, Thanks to a Supercomputer

Teenager Makes a Solar Powered Death Ray With the Power of 5000 Suns

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv

Image:

NASA