SPOT FREE

(Source: Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO))

If this were an orange it would be pretty near perfect. Actually this image of our sun is a bit of a conundrum because of its smooth appearance. Scientists from the UCLA Solar Observatory, high atop Mount Wilson in Southern California, recently reported that for the first time in over one hundred years the sun has gone an entire month without a single sunspot. In fact, as of today (9/1/08), it has been 44 days since the last sunspot.

The last half century the sun has undergone many vigorous solar cycles. A solar cycle averages about 11 years and it peaks with a period of increased sunspots, followed by a decline into a phase of few sunspots. We are in a new solar cycle now, however there has been very little sunspot activity. Recent studies of the sun (Hathaway, 2004 & Svalgard, 2005) point to changes in the sunspots temperature and magnetic strength. Both studies suggest that sunspot activity will diminish in the coming years or even vanish altogether for a period.

This would be a historic event that has not happened since the famous Maunder Minimum which occurred from 1645 to 1715. And such an event could have significance in all of our lives because the Maunder Minimum coincided with the ‘Little Ice Age’. Very little is understood about how solar cycles affect and our planet’s climate, but the correlation is there that when the sunspots vanished in 1645 our planet got dramatically cooler. In terms of global warming the suns impact on our planets climate variation is one of the lingering debates among climatologists. However, like global warming, global cooling also presents a serious set of problems highlighted by massive crop failures that could lead to mass starvation. So as if we don’t have enough to think about in these trying times the sun throws us a curve ball.

By Warren Hohmann