NO SUN SPOTS OCCURRED DURING AUGUST.... 1913 THE LAST TIME THIS HAPPENED

Drop in solar activity has potential effect for climate on earth.

The sun has reached a milestone not seen for nearly 100 years: an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted.

The event is significant as many climatologists now believe solar magnetic activity – which determines the number of sunspots -- is an influencing factor for climate on earth.

According to data from Mount Wilson Observatory, UCLA, more than an entire month has passed without a spot. The last time such an event occurred was June of 1913. Sunspot data has been collected since 1749.

When the sun is active, it's not uncommon to see sunspot numbers of 100 or more in a single month.  Every 11 years, activity slows, and numbers briefly drop to near-zero.   Normally sunspots return very quickly, as a new cycle begins.

But this year -- which corresponds to the start of Solar Cycle 24 -- has been extraordinarily long and quiet, with the first seven months averaging a sunspot number of only 3. August followed with none at all. The astonishing rapid drop of the past year has defied predictions, and caught nearly all astronomers by surprise.

In 2005, a pair of astronomers from the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson attempted to publish a paper in the journal Science. The pair looked at minute spectroscopic and magnetic changes in the sun. By extrapolating forward, they reached the startling result that, within 10 years, sunspots would vanish entirely. At the time, the sun was very active. Most of their peers laughed at what they considered an unsubstantiated conclusion.

The journal ultimately rejected the paper as being too controversial.

The paper's lead author, William Livingston, tells DailyTech that, while the refusal may have been justified at the time, recent data fits his theory well. He says he will be "secretly pleased" if his predictions come to pass.

But will the rest of us? In the past 1000 years, three previous such events -- the Dalton, Maunder, and Spörer Minimums, have all led to rapid cooling. One was large enough to be called a "mini ice age". For a society dependent on agriculture, cold is more damaging than heat. The growing season shortens, yields drop, and the occurrence of crop-destroying frosts increases.

Meteorologist Anthony Watts, who runs a climate data auditing site, tells DailyTech the sunspot numbers are another indication the "sun's dynamo" is idling. According to Watts, the effect of sunspots on TSI (total solar irradiance) is negligible, but the reduction in the solar magnetosphere affects cloud formation here on Earth, which in turn modulates climate.

This theory was originally proposed by physicist Henrik Svensmark, who has published a number of scientific papers on the subject. Last year Svensmark's "SKY" experiment claimed to have proven that galactic cosmic rays -- which the sun's magnetic field partially shields the Earth from -- increase the formation of molecular clusters that promote cloud growth. Svensmark, who recently published a book on the theory, says the relationship is a larger factor in climate change than greenhouse gases.

Solar physicist Ilya Usoskin of the University of Oulu, Finland, tells DailyTech the correlation between cosmic rays and terrestrial cloud cover is more complex than "more rays equals more clouds". Usoskin, who notes the sun has been more active since 1940 than at any point in the past 11 centuries, says the effects are most important at certain latitudes and altitudes which control climate. He says the relationship needs more study before we can understand it fully.

Other researchers have proposed solar effects on other terrestrial processes besides cloud formation. The sunspot cycle has strong effects on irradiance in certain wavelengths such as the far ultraviolet, which affects ozone production. Natural production of isotopes such as C-14 is also tied to solar activity. The overall effects on climate are still poorly understood.

What is incontrovertible, though, is that ice ages have occurred before. And no scientist, even the most skeptical, is prepared to say it won't happen again.

Article Update, Sep 1 2008.  After this story was published, the NOAA reversed their previous decision on a tiny speck seen Aug 21, which gives their version of the August data a half-point.  Other observation centers such as Mount Wilson Observatory are still reporting a spotless month.  So depending on which center you believe, August was a record for either a full century, or only 50 years.

The Large Hadron Collider

Next Wednesday, the first protons will begin their journey around a 27-mile ring of supercooled magnets under the French and Swiss border, in preparation for the largest scientific experiment in history. The Large Haldron Collider, or LHC, has taken nine billion dollars and fourteen years to come to fruition, and occupied the work of 6,000 scientists from 55 countries during that time.  Aiming to plug the gaps in our present-day understanding of the universe, it has been described as the Apollo Programme of physics.

In spite of claims by nay-sayers (who have gone to court to try and stop the machine’s operation), the world is unlikely to end via the creation of a mini-black hole once the LHC operates at full power. It has energy to create one in theory, but so too do the many cosmic rays that hit the earth on a regular basis. 

The LHC is much more likely to transform present understandings of physics, by closing the gaps in the so-called ‘Standard Model’ developed in the 1970s -- and perhaps transforming it entirely. The device will allow for progress in experimental physics after a lull of a decade or so (arising from lack of sufficiently powerful kit), including the hoped-for discovery of the ‘God Particle’, or Higgs Boson -- which the Standard Model predicts but which current particle accelerators have not been able to find. The particle has aroused the most attention (it allows mass to exist; it has an exciting name) but other results from the machine will be as stimulating, perhaps helping to explain the nature of ‘dark matter’ which is thought to make up the majority of matter in the universe.

Such profound developments in theoretical physics are important for their own sake. But the creation of the LHC once again illustrates the challenges of running large scientific projects across countries. While the LHC came in close to its budget, it did so five years after its planned start date, and most such efforts are unluckier still:

• The ITER fusion reactor, conceived in 1985, took until 2001 to plan. Arguments between the seven eventual participants (including over where to site the reactor) delayed a final agreement on construction until 2006.

• Grander but less useful, the International Space Station has seen its budget and construction time balloon over its lifespan. To cut costs, some of the more ambitious scientific modules have been cut from the design altogether. The US Government Accountability Office estimates its final cost at 100 billion dollars, not helped by diplomatic haggling over re-supply flights to the station arranged between Russia and the United States.

The LHC partly benefited from its apparent uselessness (no-one has worked out how to make money, or a weapon, from the Higgs Boson), and the collapse of the rival Superconducting Super Collider, a (relatively) primitive first attempt to do the same work. Disputes about costs and technical problems can be silenced by the scientific advances such projects allow -- the troubled Hubble Space Telescope is now regarded as a triumph. But as the costs of such projects rise, the risk of failure grows, and future scientific work risks cancellation. The LHC has a lot to live up to.