{"id":34054,"date":"2011-04-17T15:42:32","date_gmt":"2011-04-17T15:42:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/the-watched-pot-and-fast-cmes\/"},"modified":"2011-04-17T15:42:32","modified_gmt":"2011-04-17T15:42:32","slug":"the-watched-pot-and-fast-cmes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/space-station\/the-watched-pot-and-fast-cmes.php","title":{"rendered":"The Watched Pot and Fast CMEs"},"content":{"rendered":"
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If you've ever stood in front of a hot stove, watching a pot of water and waiting impatiently for it to boil, you know what it feels like to be a solar physicist.

Back in 2008, the solar cycle plunged into the deepest minimum in nearly a century. Sunspots all but vanished, solar flares subsided, and the sun was eerily quiet.<\/p>

\"Ever since, we've been waiting for solar activity to pick up,\" says Richard Fisher, head of the Heliophysics Division at NASA<\/b><\/a> Headquarters in Washington DC. \"It's been three long years.\"<\/p>

Quiet spells on the sun are nothing new. They come along every 11 years or so—it's a natural part of the solar cycle. This particular solar minimum, however, was lasting longer than usual, prompting some researchers to wonder if it would ever end.<\/p>

News flash: The pot is starting to boil. \"Finally,\" says Fisher, \"we are beginning to see some action.\"<\/p>

As 2011 unfolds, sunspots have returned and they are crackling with activity. On February 15th and again on March 9th, Earth orbiting satellites detected a pair of \"X-class\" solar flares--the most powerful kind of x-ray flare. The last such eruption occurred back in December 2006.<\/p>

Another eruption on March 7th hurled a billion-ton cloud of plasma away from the sun at five million mph (2200 km\/s). The rapidly expanding cloud wasn't aimed directly at Earth, but it did deliver a glancing blow to our planet's magnetic field. The off-center impact on March 10th was enough to send Northern Lights spilling over the Canadian border into US states such as Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan.<\/p>

\"That was the fastest coronal mass ejection in almost six years,\" says Angelos Vourlidas of the Naval Research Lab in Washington DC. \"It reminds me of a similar series of events back in Nov. 1997 that kicked off Solar Cycle 23, the solar cycle before this one.\"<\/p>

\"To me,\" says Vourlidas, \"this marks the beginning of Solar Cycle 24.\"<\/p>

The slow build-up to this moment is more than just \"the watched pot failing to boil,\" says Ron Turner, a space weather analyst at Analytic Services, Inc. \"It really has been historically slow.\"<\/p>

There have been 24 numbered solar cycles since researchers started keeping track of them in the mid-18th century. In an article just accepted for publication by the Space Weather Journal<\/b><\/a>, Turner shows that, in all that time, only four cycles have started more slowly than this one. \"Three of them were in the Dalton Minimum, a period of depressed solar activity in the early 19th century. The fourth was Cycle #1 itself, around 1755, also a relatively low solar cycle,\" he says.<\/p>

In his study, Turner used sunspots as the key metric of solar activity. Folding in the recent spate of sunspots does not substantially alter his conclusion: \"Solar Cycle 24 is a slow starter,\" he says.<\/p>

Better late than never.<\/p>

For more information visit http:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/mission_pages\/sunearth\/news\/watchedpot-fastCME.html<\/a>
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If you've ever stood in front of a hot stove, watching a pot of water and waiting impatiently for it to boil, you know what it feels like to be a solar physicist.Back in 2008, the solar cycle plunged into … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space-station"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34054"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34054\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}