Sunspots
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The NASA website says: "Imagine you're in California. It's
July, the middle of summer. The sun rises early; bright rays
warm the ground. It's a great day to be outside. Then,
suddenly, it begins to snow--not just a little flurry, but a
swirling blizzard that doesn't stop for two weeks." According
to solar physicist David Hathaway, "Something like that just
happened on the sun." Was this predicted by a mysterious
crop circle?
A crop circle laid down in 1995 displayed the positions
of the planets as they would be on September 6, 2003. As a
result, crop circle watchers waited eagerly for that date,
which apparently came and went without incident.
But now we've learned that a blast of active particles from an
explosion on a distant star moved through our solar system at
about that time. Subsequently, the sun has entered the most
unusual period of activity ever recorded, with by far the
largest solar flare ever seen, and almost continuous
bombardment of earth with various types of solar radiation.
Could this be a contributing factor?
To see a photo of the September 6th crop circle formation,
click
here.
"Mild is just what we expect at this point in the 11-year solar
cycle," says Hathaway. "The most recent maximum was in
2001, and solar activity has been declining ever since." But in
October, strange things began happening. Three giant
sunspots appeared, each larger than the planet Jupiter. One
of them, sunspot 486, was the largest in 13 years.
Astronauts and some people in airplanes received radiation
doses equal to a chest x-ray.
The European Union's Beagle spacecraft, which is scheduled
to land on Mars on Christmas day, had its navigational
equipment temporarily knocked out. Fortunately, the Beagle 2
lander was unaffected. Mark Sims, at ESA's mission control,
says, "The Beagle 2 is designed to be radiation hard."
Two years after a solar maximum, why is the sun going
haywire? Hathway says that, despite appearances, we're still
headed for a solar minimum, as part of the normal sun
cycle. "There's a curious tendency for the biggest flares to
occur after solar maximum?on the downslope toward solar
minimum. This has happened during two of the last three
solar cycles," he says.
But he admits that, "It's hard to be sure what's normal and
what's not. Astronomers have been observing x-rays from the
sun for only 35 years?or three solar cycles. We can't draw
good statistical conclusions from so few data."
The most recent sunspots, including 486, are now on the far
side of the sun, facing away from us, so they're no longer
affecting us, but Hathaway says, "We suspect they're still
active."
To learn more,
click here and
here.
