Interestingly this happens every 11 years and also their is a longer cycle called the Hale cycle which is double the length at 22 years. It flips from a mostly dipole where the poles match the orientation of earth to a reverse and much more irregular magenetic orientation. I didn't see anything about how this really affects Earth directly other than what I knew previously about sun spots make Coronal Mass Ejections sometimes towards Earth. Think we had a few things happen recently due to those but nothing too crazy.
My understanding is that the Hale cycle is just a complete "360° flip" of 2 "180° flips". I.e. the 11 year cycle is essentially going from "mostly dipole" (but say with north magnetic direction going one way) to irregular and then back to mostly dipole, but this time with magnetic north pointing in the opposite direction. The next 11 year cycle gets magnetic north pointing back "up" again.
The CLOUD experiment found that sulfuric acid, nitric acid, and ammonia combine in the upper atmosphere to form particles that seed clouds, driven by chemicals and human activities, without mentioning the Sun's magnetic pole reversal.
While certainly solar activity affects the atmosphere broadly, such as ozone levels influenced by UV radiation and solar particles, the CLOUD study writeup here doesn’t show a direct impact on the specific aerosol-forming reactions.
So, while solar activity influences some chemistry such as ozone formation, it’s unclear if it affects the reactions described by CLOUD.
I think there is a more interesting (and longer scale) trend that is less talked about, that the last couple solar cycles have been overall less intense (less activity/spots at the maximums)-
I wish that chart went further back to see if there is a greater cycle at play. At a glance it looks like this cycle is a slight rebound over the last.
I recall back a few years reading some articles speaking about the sun entering in a Grand Solar Minimum cycle similar to the Maunder minimum, and that the result could be global cooling, etc.
Not sure if there's been additional research or conjecture since then.
The theory is that we're due for another ice age and that there's going to be a pole shift. Pumping CO2 into the atmosphere would then be the best thing to do to stave off this scenario.
I'm convinced in a few hundred/thousand years scientists are going to be urging politicians to figure out how to pump more CO2 into the atmosphere due to cooling from cyclic perturbations of Earth's orbit. Too bad I won't be around to enjoy the irony.
So going off of the previous HN thread, I thought we were due for a Carrington event a month ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40321821). Will this next bout of astronomical magnetic phenomena pose a threat to technological civilization as we know it?
Perhaps. The Carrington event was 2-4 times as strong as the one last month, but on the other hand it also looks like most of the electrical systems are a lot more resilient than they used to be.
When we had the CME headed towards Earth recently, I was pretty amazed at the sheer number of highly-upvoted HN comments whose authors seemed to believe that the power grid, copper phone lines, and communications satellites were all about to be wiped out.
Fortunately, most engineers in all of the fields above are well aware of the Carrington Event. And while it's not beyond possibility that there might be some corner cases if (when?) another one happens, we know how to design these systems to keep another one from causing any major outages or damage.
I am curious about how would the general public be made aware of another Carrington-class storm. NOAA rated May 2024 storm as G5, which is the highest rating for a geomagnetic storm regarding its effect on the public.
I'm having trouble parsing tfa; does this mean the sun is at "solar maximum" now, and does this also mean we may be in for some more frequent and intense auroras?
> One side effect of the magnetic field shift is slight but primarily beneficial: It can help shield Earth from galactic cosmic rays — high-energy subatomic particles that travel at near light speed and can damage spacecraft and harm orbiting astronauts who are outside Earth's protective atmosphere.
Buried three sentences from the end of the article, after a wall of ads and filler (I'm impatient).
Why? Is it because the poles are aligned with earths, complimenting our own magnetic field?
It appears the magnetic poles are in continuous rotation [1], that sometimes aligns to the rotational poles and sometimes doesn't, with a "flip" event being the binary classification from the slow and smooth traversal over the equator. I feel silly, but I always assumed it was from some more fairly sharp step in the rate of change!
There is an animation further down that shows the magnetic field generated by the sun when it is a dipole. Apparently the 3-d wave like pattern better shields from cosmic rays originating outside the solar system.
I recall a few years ago a what seemed to be ground-breaking white paper from I think a Russian scientist, who argued (and convincingly) that there are two cycles at work, one deep in the Sun, the other shallow. The co-incidence of these two cycles both being at maximum, or both being at minimum, explaining the extremes of solar activity.
That sounds like Gnevishev, M. N.; Ohl, A. I. (1948). "On the 22-year cycle of solar activity" which first appeared in the Russian journal Astronomicheskii Zhurnal 76 years past.
Very interesting! but not that - it was much more recent, few years ago. What I'm thinking of was not writing about a 22 year cycle; it was arguing for two independent cycles, one deep in the solar atmosphere, one toward the surface.
We know so much and yet so little. The writing is in the article stating how mathematically they have no model, therefore they cannot truly understand it yet (researchers/academics).
This is true for climate change and it's own challenges along with many other applications of similar nature where models are incomplete or entirely missing large portions of data needed to further true understanding of a given process.
As is common in physics, a subject can be extremely well studied, theories can be produced, models can be created that predict future behaviour incredibly precisely, but because we can’t poke it hard enough or with enough precision the exact underlying mechanism remains unconfirmed.
Readit News
1. https://home.web.cern.ch/news/news/physics/cloud-discovers-n...
That specific article, while interesting, doesn't mention the sun's magnetic field once.
Nor the sun, nor magnetic fields.
While certainly solar activity affects the atmosphere broadly, such as ozone levels influenced by UV radiation and solar particles, the CLOUD study writeup here doesn’t show a direct impact on the specific aerosol-forming reactions.
So, while solar activity influences some chemistry such as ozone formation, it’s unclear if it affects the reactions described by CLOUD.
Dead Comment
http://solen.info/solar/images/comparison_recent_cycles.png
I wish that chart went further back to see if there is a greater cycle at play. At a glance it looks like this cycle is a slight rebound over the last.
Not sure if there's been additional research or conjecture since then.
There is a chart of all observed cycles on the same website.
http://www.solen.info/solar/cycles1_to_present.html
Fortunately, most engineers in all of the fields above are well aware of the Carrington Event. And while it's not beyond possibility that there might be some corner cases if (when?) another one happens, we know how to design these systems to keep another one from causing any major outages or damage.
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/solar-cycle-progression
Buried three sentences from the end of the article, after a wall of ads and filler (I'm impatient).
It appears the magnetic poles are in continuous rotation [1], that sometimes aligns to the rotational poles and sometimes doesn't, with a "flip" event being the binary classification from the slow and smooth traversal over the equator. I feel silly, but I always assumed it was from some more fairly sharp step in the rate of change!
[1] https://www.stce.be/news/211/welcome.html
Is this related to why my part of the US has had UV notices lately?
This is true for climate change and it's own challenges along with many other applications of similar nature where models are incomplete or entirely missing large portions of data needed to further true understanding of a given process.