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Strange Doings on the Sun

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Re: Strange Doings on the Sun

#31

Post by mhurron »

300bps wrote: post #29
phaemon wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science doesn't work like that. We've only observed a tiny proportion of the Moon's orbits around the Earth, but we can still predict an eclipse of the Sun and we know that it's not going to crash into the Earth tomorrow. Why not learn a bit about the subject? Stars really are fascinating!

I think your example is not a good one and the premise you meant to have it support is flawed. 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 w…

> The fact that scientists seem to be baffled

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.

Re: Strange Doings on the Sun

#32

Post by yread »

memracom wrote: post #26
Zenst wrote: post #3

I do wonder having recently read about a comet with multiple tails that this is related. http://www.nasa.gov/press/2013/november/nasas-hubble-sees-as... 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 fewe…

And along with "fewer than normal" the northern hemisphere also had the most powerful hurricane ever known "Haiyan".

It's not the "most powerful hurricane ever known", it's ~30th in pressure since 50s, it only had the highest speed at landfall due to a conversion error

Re: Strange Doings on the Sun

#33

Post by 300bps »

mhurron wrote: post #31
300bps wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your example is not a good one and the premise you meant to have it support is flawed. 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 w…

> The fact that scientists seem to be baffled 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.

I think you may have missed my point. The comment I was replying to essentially said, "If we can predict A with little information then we can predict B with little information". My point was that this is not necessarily true and certainly not true in this instance. After all, scientists are frequently wrong about sunspot activity predictions and rarely wrong about where the moon will be at any particular time of the day / year.

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.

Re: Strange Doings on the Sun

#34

Post by phaemon »

300bps wrote: post #29
phaemon wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science doesn't work like that. We've only observed a tiny proportion of the Moon's orbits around the Earth, but we can still predict an eclipse of the Sun and we know that it's not going to crash into the Earth tomorrow. Why not learn a bit about the subject? Stars really are fascinating!

I think your example is not a good one and the premise you meant to have it support is flawed. 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 w…

> it is hubris to think that after a few hundred years of studying a 4 billion year old dynamic object

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.

Re: Strange Doings on the Sun

#35

Post by anigbrowl »

GFischer wrote: post #30
anigbrowl wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope this is some masochistic exercise forced on young astronomers to make them appreciate what their forbears had to do before they're let loose on the computers. I'm also puzzled as to why the date is logged as 11 December, since it's the 11th of November.

Edit: I found this interesting piece which details how Steve Padilla has been doing the drawings for 40 years! 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…

I said '11 Dec 2013' so I don't think it's euro/US date format confusion (and I'm Euro myself, so I wholeheartedly approve of putting the mday before the month like every other sane person).

Re: Strange Doings on the Sun

#36

Post by anigbrowl »

aashaykumar92 wrote: post #10

Given the tools we have to detect the sun's 'doings' today are magnanimously more sophisticated than 200 years ago, could it be that 200 years ago several fluctuations were missed because the overall balance still remained throughout the cycles?

Magnanimous means generous, BTW. It's not appropriate in this context.

Re: Strange Doings on the Sun

#37

Post by DanBC »

jlgreco wrote: post #5
dreid3 wrote: post #2

Ho-ly shit, the comments. It's almost like it was linked from Drudge or Fox News.

From the comments: "No mention of the four comets currently in the Solar System. I'm no genius, but don't you think four electromagnetic balls of energy might have an effect on the Sun's magnetic field." (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" fie…

I would donate to a crowd-funded thing that did that.

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.

Re: Strange Doings on the Sun

#38

Post by anigbrowl »

anigbrowl wrote: post #35
GFischer wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: I found this interesting piece which details how Steve Padilla has been doing the drawings for 40 years! 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…

I said '11 Dec 2013' so I don't think it's euro/US date format confusion (and I'm Euro myself, so I wholeheartedly approve of putting the mday before the month like every other sane person).

s/I/It
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