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Strange Doings on the Sun
- dreid3 13y agoHo-ly shit, the comments. It's almost like it was linked from Drudge or Fox News.
- Zenst 13y agoIndeed 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.
- jlgreco 13y agoFrom 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.
- SapphireSun 13y agoSmall 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.
- jlgreco 13y agoAh, technically correct... the best kind of correct.
- anigbrowl 13y agoI 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.
- alex_doom 13y agoGreater Internet Fuckwad Theory
- slsah 13y agoI thought that was sarcasm. I went to wsj to see the context but couldn't find the comment. Anyway, here are pictures of the aforementioned comets: http://www.universetoday.com/105834/weekend-comet-bonanza/#ixzz2j7yHyaGe http://www.universetoday.com/105834/weekend-comet-bonanza/#i...
- DanBC 13y agoI 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.
- anigbrowl 13y agoThe 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.
- refurb 13y agoYou need something to counter the kinds of comments you find on Huffington Post or Democratic Underground!
- Zenst 13y agoI do wonder having recently read about a comet with multiple tails that this is related. http://www.nasa.gov/press/2013/november/nasas-hubble-sees-asteroid-spouting-six-comet-like-tails/ http://www.nasa.gov/press/2013/november/nasas-hubble-sees-as... 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.
- memracom 13y agoAnd along with "fewer than normal" the northern hemisphere also had the most powerful hurricane ever known "Haiyan".
- yread 13y agoIt'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
- codezero 13y agoTechnically that is an asteroid with a comet-like tail. The main difference is where it comes from and the type of material it's made out of.
- csense 13y agoSince 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."
- flatline 13y agoThat 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?
- sliverstorm 13y agoEven 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.
- InclinedPlane 13y agoIt'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.
- sliverstorm 13y agoThanks, radar air traffic control is another good example. The world would not end without GPS, it would just make things harder :)
- aashaykumar92 13y agoGiven 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?
- nmcveity 13y agoI 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: http://obs.astro.ucla.edu/cur_drw.html http://obs.astro.ucla.edu/cur_drw.html
- anigbrowl 13y agoI 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.
- _delirium 13y agoIt looks like they've been doing it this way since 1917: ftp://howard.astro.ucla.edu/pub/obs/drawings/ Some information on the process: http://obs.astro.ucla.edu/150_draw.html http://obs.astro.ucla.edu/150_draw.html 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?
- GFischer 13y agoEdit: I found this interesting piece which details how Steve Padilla has been doing the drawings for 40 years! http://www.latimes.com/local/columnone/la-me-c1-mt-wilson-sun-spots-20131028-dto,0,4430093.htmlstory http://www.latimes.com/local/columnone/la-me-c1-mt-wilson-su... 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. ?
- pocketstar 13y ago>"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?
- ced 13y agoFor more context, I recommend looking at the two graphs here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunspot#Variation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunspot#Variation 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. [1] For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_Dynasty#Economic_breakdown_and_natural_disasters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_Dynasty#Economic_breakdow...
- DustinCalim 13y agoI'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...
- phaemon 13y agoScience 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!
- 300bps 13y agoI 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.
- mhurron 13y ago> The fact that scientists seem to be baffled You might be reading more into science reporting than you should. 'Hm, that's odd' is reported as 'baffled'. People that actually work in the field do not believe they know it all as you suggest.
- 300bps 13y agoI 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.