Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The sun's magnetic field is about to flip

space.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 185 posts

Re: The sun's magnetic field is about to flip

#81

Post by TheBlight »

hughesjj wrote: post #60
TheBlight wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think it would be any more ironic than a house using the heater in the winter and ac in the summer Also, acidification is another problem of co2. Honestly you might rather release methane or refrigerant if your goal was only to heat/insulate the atmosphere with minimal changes to chemistry, but I'm not a chemist etc Also never forget the great oxygenation event and the azola cooling the planet to the point of…

Fair enough.

Re: The sun's magnetic field is about to flip

#82

Post by tomoyoirl »

temp0826 wrote: post #71
TheBlight wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Regardless of the cause of climate change, on any time scale (even if it is a 100% natural cycle and human effects are zilch in the grand scheme), pollution is icky and hey, I'm walking^W living over here .

With respect, 2/3 of the carbon dioxide out there is purely natural such that “icky” isn’t an appropriate foundation for the relevant public policy

Re: The sun's magnetic field is about to flip

#83

Post by drbacon »

dredmorbius wrote: post #45
contravariant wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want something to make it easier to find the sun ? Anyway the sun's magnetic fields is ridiculously weak on earth.

Well, one always has to consider the first manned expedition to the Sun and how they'll navigate. Telling time of day would be the first problem as it's always high noon. And star sightings might prove challenging, at least at optical frequencies. (Am now thinking of an SF story set on the Sun in which navigation and timekeeping play critical roles....)

> Telling time of day would be the first problem as it's always high noon.

If the sun is always directly down from the surface, doesn't that make it solar midnight from anywhere on the surface?

Re: The sun's magnetic field is about to flip

#84

Post by dredmorbius »

drbacon wrote: post #83
dredmorbius wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, one always has to consider the first manned expedition to the Sun and how they'll navigate. Telling time of day would be the first problem as it's always high noon. And star sightings might prove challenging, at least at optical frequencies. (Am now thinking of an SF story set on the Sun in which navigation and timekeeping play critical roles....)

> Telling time of day would be the first problem as it's always high noon. If the sun is always directly down from the surface, doesn't that make it solar midnight from anywhere on the surface?

A fair argument.

Re: The sun's magnetic field is about to flip

#85

Post by eerpini »

nomel wrote: post #41
cko wrote: post #2

> 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 ch…

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.

Re: The sun's magnetic field is about to flip

#86

Post by ricardobeat »

luxuryballs wrote: post #80
gleenn wrote: post #3

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 s…

[flagged]

That coincidence plot in the paper is amazing. I wonder what the criteria was to include a pandemic episode.

In the last link I don’t see any correlation at all, these are are completely different time scales? And even if there was, it’s meaningless as you can probably find a dozen random graphs (price of milk, number of eggs laid per chicken, left-handed births or whatever) that happen to be a near-perfect match to solar cycles.

Re: The sun's magnetic field is about to flip

#87

Post by semi »

1oooqooq wrote: post #61
TheBlight wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

or we will learn those studies were by the same caliber of people who did the food pyramid etc

The food pyramid is misunderstood

'those scientists' were from Sweden responding to protests over the increasing costs of food due to famine. When looked at from the lens of maximizing calories per dollar, it makes a lot more sense.

Re: The sun's magnetic field is about to flip

#88

Post by ben_w »

TheBlight wrote: post #51
c0brac0bra wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Given the orbital perturbations are on timescales of hundreds of thousands of years, no.

(That said, if we make it past the next century, we're probably going to be disassembling entire planets with von Neumann replicators rather than concerning ourselves with something as small as a mere atmosphere).

Re: The sun's magnetic field is about to flip

#90

Post by ben_w »

Apocryphon wrote: post #76

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.
Post reply on HN