Strange Doings on the Sun
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
And they put them on the web. If you want to see "puzzling" lack of sunspot activity, here it is:
I'm also puzzled as to why the date is logged as 11 December, since it's the 11th of November.
Some information on the process: 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?
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. ?
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_breakdow...
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.
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...
Why not learn a bit about the subject? Stars really are fascinating!
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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?
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.
(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.
* 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 was catastrophically wrong. Most people are idiots, and idiots like to travel in packs. Sorry about that.
Anyway, here are pictures of the aforementioned comets: http://www.universetoday.com/105834/weekend-comet-bonanza/#i...
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.