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The sun's magnetic field is about to flip

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

#121

Post by mapt »

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]

There are so many visible red flags in this one and my priors are sturdy enough that I think it's safe to call it nonsense with barely a skim. This seems like somebody that came to a spurious conclusion and then decided to write a paper justifying it by spamming statistical techniques until something fit.

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

#122

Post by vikingerik »

kulahan wrote: post #97
lukan wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Jupiter was a failed star, it failed big time. "Although Jupiter would need to be about 75 times more massive to fuse hydrogen and become a star,[66] its diameter is sufficient as the smallest red dwarf may be only slightly larger in radius than Saturn." It got as big as it could be, though. "Theoretical models indicate that if Jupiter had over 40% more mass, the interior would be so compressed that its volume wou…

I think the point is that it's pretty darn close to the very fuzzy limit of when something can be a star vs. when it can't. If it were off in space on its own, rather than orbiting our star, it might be a contentious classification

No - the definition of a star isn't fuzzy at all. It's defined by hydrogen fusion - if it's doing that (or did in the past), it's a star, or if it isn't then it's not. Jupiter fails this by a factor of 75.

Brown dwarfs (which fuse deuterium but not regular hydrogen, starting at about 13x Jupiter's mass) were thought to be in a fuzzy area, but then their own category was created for them.

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

#123

Post by bityard »

ben_w wrote: post #90
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.

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.

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

#124

Post by IAmGraydon »

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]

Can we get a vote-to-ban button for posters like this? It’s getting bad lately and clearly this has become too big a job for Dang.

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

#126

Post by defrost »

P_I_Staker wrote: post #125

It's just really sad to see all in the storys about the ends of earth. Every thing a new day to kill us. Now were to be wiped out enterirely.

It's not a story about the end of the earth.

It's a story about a regular recurring solar phenomenon.

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

#127

Post by BurningFrog »

P_I_Staker wrote: post #125

It's just really sad to see all in the storys about the ends of earth. Every thing a new day to kill us. Now were to be wiped out enterirely.

Relax. Humanity has always produced stories about the ends of earth, and we always will.

It's just something we do.

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

#128

Post by aftbit »

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]

https://xkcd.com/882/

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

#129

Post by autoexec »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #124
luxuryballs wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Can we get a vote-to-ban button for posters like this? It’s getting bad lately and clearly this has become too big a job for Dang.

That seems kind of extreme. While I wouldn't take this paper as proof that the sun is causing pandemics, the correlation is an interesting bit of trivia.

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

#130

Post by getlawgdon »

autoexec wrote: post #129
IAmGraydon wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we get a vote-to-ban button for posters like this? It’s getting bad lately and clearly this has become too big a job for Dang.

That seems kind of extreme. While I wouldn't take this paper as proof that the sun is causing pandemics, the correlation is an interesting bit of trivia.

In what way is it interesting? And how is it trivia?
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