Experts Continue To Wait For Sunspots To Reappear
An unusual absence of sunspots has many experts and record-keepers baffled as they wait to see how much time it takes for them to return to the star’s surface.
Sunspots are the result of the Sun’s magnetic field tearing “˜holes’ into its surface. Meteorologists use the arrival and disappearance of sunspots to gauge how active solar cycles will be.
When the sun is more active, several sunspots can appear on a daily basis. However, very few have been spotted in 2008. Experts had even assumed that August would mark the first month since 1913 that record-keepers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration hadn’t seen a single spot for an entire month.
It wasn’t until August 21 and 22 that the Solar Influences Data Analysis reported the glimpse of one dark spot.
Now, meteorologists must wait until the spots reappear in order to better estimate the level of the Sun’s activity over the upcoming 11-year solar cycle. Experts say the question is not when will the sunspots reappear, but rather how fast will their numbers increase once they start to appear.
"The big [cycles], they start out with a bang. One month, there may be none, the next month they may be all over the place," said Leif Svalgaard of Stanford University.
If they do begin to appear quickly, experts will have evidence to suggest that solar cycles will be very active, but some space meteorologists have already concluded that the new cycle will be relatively light.
Conversely, some experts project that evidence that the next cycle will be irregularly strong because they claim magnetic fields travel for decades deep within the Sun’s interior before returning to punch holes in its surface, creating sunspots.
"As scientists, we’re anxiously awaiting [the return of sunspots] because this is really going to help us weed out our different theories," said David Hathaway of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
"The worst nightmare is that it’s right smack in the middle," Svalgaard says of the sunspots’ rate of return. "Then all we know is [the models] are all bad."
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