All posts tagged: Sun

Don’t let the sun’s smiley face fool you

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Describing the sun as our solar system’s largest nuclear reactor, NASA recently tweeted a photo, taken by one of its satellites, of the sun showing a bizarre-looking smiley face. But don’t let that smile fool you. Those dark spots are caused by coronal holes, which are areas of high magnetic activity, which are spewing out solar winds into space. In large enough quantities, these have the potential to disrupt radio and television communication on earth and even damage electrical equipment. The National Post provides a quote by Brian Keating, a physics professor at the University of California: “When the particles, which carry electrical charge, hit the planet in small doses, colourful auroras might follow, bringing brilliant displays caused by the atmosphere’s gases interacting with the sun’s burped-up shoots of energy. The problems come if a tremendous number of the teeny-tiny particles hit Earth, Keating said. Instead of being sucked into Earth’s magnetic field, they could get picked up by radio antennae and disrupt radio, television and other communication channels. A severe solar storm could even …

Reduced sunspots on the sun could mean cooling

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UK’s Met Office and Royal Astronomical Society are reporting a significant decline in the number of sunspots on the sun. It is referred to as a “solar minimum” that typically takes place every 11 years. The Daily Mail writes:  Which means that the activity on the Sun’s surface has fallen dramatically, and its magnetic field has become weaker, letting into the environment more of the sort of cosmic rays that cause dramatic lightning storms and interfere with astronauts and space hardware.  They can also can lead to the explosion of ‘sprites’ — clusters of orange and red lights that shoot out of the top of thunderstorms like 60-mile-high palm trees in the sky.  Oh yes, and on top of all that, theoretically it could cause the temperature on Earth to drop to potentially catastrophic new lows. … So far this year, the Sun has been ‘blank’ — with no sunspots — 76 per cent of the time. A figure surpassed just once since the Fifties, last year, when it was 77 per cent blank. But …

Solar concern: The Sun is shooting blanks

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Paul Dorian is a noted meteorologist and sun watcher and earlier this month he expressed his concerns that the sun shot blanks twice in June. This takes place when the sun looks blank because of a lack of sun spots or solar activity. He said that the sun went completely blank on June 4 and solar activity did not start-up again until June 8th and then again on June 23. In between those two blank periods, Dorian described the sun spots as “sporadic.” According to NASA the sun goes through a 11-year cycle of increased and decreased sun spot activity called a “solar maximum” and “solar minimum.” This is the normal life of the sun. Dorian says the recent spur in blanks indicates the sun is entering the minimum part of its cycle. However, in what he describes as the “Weakest solar cycle in more than a century,” the extreme nature of the minimum is concerning him. This could be paving the way for a much more alarming solar event called a “Maunder minimum.” Similar …

Ship sailing into the sunset. Photo: Ozgur Mulazimoglu/Flickr/Creative Commons

Does the Bible predict a solar ‘superflare’?

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Our sun experiences massive explosions on its surface on a regular basis. Up to know it was thought our sun could only produce minor eruptions compared to the superflares other suns are capable of producing. Superflares occur when a large magnetic field on a sun’s surface collapses resulting in a massive release of energetic energy and plasma. Astronomers were able to study superflares after NASA launched a space observatory, called the Kepler Mission, in 2009. It had on board a massive telescope intended to look for other planets in our Milky Way that could hold life. Though it failed miserably on that front, astronomers saw other suns giving off massive solar flares, 10 to 100 times larger than what our sun typically throws off. After analyzing this data, researchers with Denmark’s Aarhus University concluded that though our sun does not routinely give off superflares, it is capable of doing so. Compared to most suns studied, ours has a weaker magnetic field. But they noticed that suns with the same-sized and even weaker magnetic fields as …

Book of Revelation warns global warming is coming, just not yet, and not because of CO2

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[by Dean Smith] This past January, it was broadcast that 2014 was the warmest year on record. As I recently wrote, a major English newspaper, The Telegraph, reported there was some re-jigging of the original temperature data that resulted in 2014 winning the award for the hottest year. One area in South America showed some of the highest temperatures. However, when others fact checked the original temperature data they found something strange. Between 1950 and 2011, the original temperature data from rural weather stations in Paraguay showed temperature had dropped 1 degree C. However, once this temperature data was adjusted, the temperature data instead showed a 1.5 degree Centigrade increase.