“If your planet doesn’t have a magnetic field, you can have all the atmosphere you want,” he said, “but your local friendly neighborhood star could whisk it away in a heartbeat.” Mars, he pointed out, doesn’t have much of an atmosphere or a magnetic field. “And if you think about it, Earth’s magnetic field is largely why we probably have life on Earth.” Potential hazards aside, understanding how the sunspot cycle actually works is crucial “from a purely human standpoint, if you want to understand stars,” Dr. He added, “So my plan is to wait and see.” The conversation, as he recalled it, went: “The next cycle will be stronger than average, the next cycle will be weaker than average, the next cycle will be either stronger than average or weaker than average, the next cycle will be neither stronger than average nor weaker than average.” In an email, he recounted a meeting during the last cycle that had “an amusing set of talks.” Jay Pasachoff, an astronomer at Williams College who has spent his life observing the corona during solar eclipses, said he did not put much store in such forecasts. And so, according to Scott, they are doomed to get the big picture wrong.” “In other words, there’s more to the solar cycle than is commonly assumed by conventional models. “Scott and Bob are standing off to the side shouting, ‘Hey, you guys are ignoring most of the elephant,’” he said. This energy, they found, matched the output that was generated 100,000 years ago and is only now detectable. The researchers were able to calculate how much energy the sun produces in real time, by measuring subatomic particles called neutrinos that are produced by nuclear reactions inside the sun, escape in seconds and reach Earth in just eight minutes. A few years ago an experiment in Italy confirmed that our star does not seem to have changed its energy output in at least the last 100,000 years, the time it takes that energy to migrate from the sun’s core. The sun is amazingly consistent in making these mortgage payments. ![]() As the energy emerges from the sun, it rises through successively cooler and less dense layers of gas and finally, 100,000 years later, from the photosphere, or surface, where the temperature is a mere 5,700 kelvin, or 9,800 degrees Fahrenheit. ![]() The missing four million tons, turned into pure energy, constitute the mortgage payment for all the life on Earth and perhaps elsewhere in the solar system. The result is a snarled nest of magnetic fields, which manifest as sunspots and worse when they break the surface.Įvery second, thermonuclear reactions in the center of the sun burn 600 million tons of hydrogen into 596 million tons of helium. Its large inside rotates faster than its outside, and the outer layers rotate faster at the equator than at the poles. The sun is a medium-size star, a ball of blazing-hot ionized gas one million miles in diameter.
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