The Sun's Heliosphere is 25% Smaller

[seasmith]

This may have been previously posted, but apparently, the
"Solar Wind" is loosing its oomph :

The protective bubble around the sun that helps to shield the Earth from harmful interstellar radiation is shrinking and getting weaker, Nasa scientists have warned.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... nking.html

[Tzunamii]

This may have been previously posted, but apparently, the
"Solar Wind" is loosing its oomph :

The protective bubble around the sun that helps to shield the Earth from harmful interstellar radiation is shrinking and getting weaker, Nasa scientists have warned.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... nking.html

A quote from above article,

Dr David McComas, principal investigator on the IBEX mission, said: "It is a fascinating interaction that our sun has with the galaxy surrounding us. This million mile an hour wind inflates this protective bubble that keeps us safe from intergalactic cosmic rays.

"With less pressure on the inside, the interaction at the boundaries becomes weaker and the heliosphere as a whole gets smaller."

I propose an "Increase the Pressure" campaign, urging industry to pump out gas emissions, helping to keep the suns heliosphere properly inflated.
In hindsight, perhaps the gasbags we call Politicians, reporters and those involved with our scientific peer review, are thus so as a preventative measure from the threat of heloipause-deflation?
Thankyou for spending billions on this crap. you gotta be kidding me.

[junglelord]

Sun's protective 'bubble' is shrinking
The protective bubble around the sun that helps to shield the Earth from harmful interstellar radiation is shrinking and getting weaker, Nasa scientists have warned.

New data has revealed that the heliosphere, the protective shield of energy that surrounds our solar system, has weakened by 25 per cent over the past decade and is now at it lowest level since the space race began 50 years ago.

Scientists are baffled at what could be causing the barrier to shrink in this way and are to launch mission to study the heliosphere.

The Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, will be launched from an aircraft on Sunday on a Pegasus rocket into an orbit 150,000 miles above the Earth where it will "listen" for the shock wave that forms as our solar system meets the interstellar radiation.

Dr Nathan Schwadron, co-investigator on the IBEX mission at Boston University, said: "The interstellar medium, which is part of the galaxy as a whole, is actually quite a harsh environment. There is a very high energy galactic radiation that is dangerous to living things.

"Around 90 per cent of the galactic cosmic radiation is deflected by our heliosphere, so the boundary protects us from this harsh galactic environment."

The heliosphere is created by the solar wind, a combination of electrically charged particles and magnetic fields that emanate a more than a million miles an hour from the sun, meet the intergalactic gas that fills the gaps in space between solar systems.

At the boundary where they meet a shock wave is formed that deflects interstellar radiation around the solar system as it travels through the galaxy.

The scientists hope the IBEX mission will allow them to gain a better understanding of what happens at this boundary and help them predict what protection it will offer in the future.

Without the heliosphere the harmful intergalactic cosmic radiation would make life on Earth almost impossible by destroying DNA and making the climate uninhabitable.

Measurements made by the Ulysses deep space probe, which was launched in 1990 to orbit the sun, have shown that the pressure created inside the heliosphere by the solar wind has been decreasing.

Dr David McComas, principal investigator on the IBEX mission, said: "It is a fascinating interaction that our sun has with the galaxy surrounding us. This million mile an hour wind inflates this protective bubble that keeps us safe from intergalactic cosmic rays.

"With less pressure on the inside, the interaction at the boundaries becomes weaker and the heliosphere as a whole gets smaller."

If the heliosphere continues to weaken, scientists fear that the amount of cosmic radiation reaching the inner parts of our solar system, including Earth, will increase.

This could result in growing levels of disruption to electrical equipment, damage satellites and potentially even harm life on Earth.

But Dr McComas added that it was still unclear exactly what would happen if the heliosphere continued to weaken or what even what the timescale for changes in the heliosphere are.

He said: “There is no imminent danger, but it is hard to know what the future holds. Certainly if the solar wind pressure was to continue to go down and the heliosphere were to almost evaporate then we would be in this sea of galactic cosmic rays. That could have some large effects.

“It is likely that there are natural variations in solar wind pressure and over time it will either stabilise or start going back up.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... nking.html

[substance]

Does this combined with the solar activity minimum mean that the birkeland currents creating our sun are lowering their electrical values? Shouldn`t such a big change in the sun`s activity have an immediate effect on Earth?

[rcglinsk]

Perhaps y'all read this today:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... nking.html

"The sun's protective bubble is shrinking."

Putting asside the normal lamestream mistakes, calling a dual layer a "bubble" and insisting some mythical "shock wave" creates it, I'm wondering if the data they cite is actually justification for the argument that the helisphere is losing its ability to deflect cosmic rays from other solar systems. It's a bit confusing and I was hoping to get more learned opinions. They say "the pressure created inside the heliosphere by the solar wind has been decreasing." Does it logically follow that fewer cosmic rays are being deflected than before the pressure decreased? What could "pressure" mean there anyway? The solar system is not a baloon.

[seasmith]

~
Just grist for the mental mill, an impressive gallery of LARGE solar photos:

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/10/the_sun.html

~

[junglelord]

After all I have learned from the MIT lecture series on Electrostatics, the sun is a attractor of electrons, and the center of the sun would be a zero point. The heliosphere is a giant reflection of atomic charge. It is not a wave nor a particle, it is distributed spherical charge. Since I looked at the book of Coincidence today and its relationships to PHI and the orbits of the planets I am reeling in the new relationships of sacred geometry.
http://www.electronspin.org/24.htm
and after I saw the platonic solids creating the valence band electron shell geometry,
http://blazelabs.com/f-p-solids.asp
the thought of the relationship of planetary ratios at every level is related to a spherical heliosphere which makes the sacred geometry connections is just amazing. I get it, I totally get it.

We know all the material was made by the molecules, the molecule was consisted of atoms, the atom consists of electrons, protons and neutrons, and so all material has electromagnetic origin.

Electric charge and magnetic charge are the most basic properties of electromagnetic field.

Based on the charge distribution, we can get field distribution.
Based on the field distribution, we can get field velocity.
The charge moves according to the field velocity.
Because of the velocity, the charge distribution keeps changing.
Because the charge distribution changes, the field then changes.
Because the field changes, then the field velocity changes.

Based on the distribution of electric charge and magnetic charge in space, and according the Gauss Law for electric field and magnetic field, we can get the electric field and magnetic field distribution.

And then, based on the electric field and magnetic field space distributions, we can get the electromagnetic field velocity, and then all of the electric and magnetic charges will move according to the electromagnetic field velocity.

The electric charge and magnetic charge space distribution will keep changing, then the electric field and magnetic field will keep changing, and then electromagnetic field velocity will also keep changing.

However the change happened, the electric charge and magnetic charge will keep conserved.

All the basic particles include electrons, protons and neutrons, they are no longer regarded as point-like particles, but are instead considered to have a spherical electromagnetic field with the continuum distribution of electric charge and magnetic charge.

The key relationship between time-space and energy-momentum is the velocity of the electromagnetic field.
http://www.electronspin.org/24.htm

[vukcevic]

As a part of my research into heliosperic current interaction with planetary magnetospheres I attempted to calculate relative value of solar dynamo's strength at times of solar minima. Preliminary results are shown on the graph.

(http://www.vukcevic.co.uk/solar_dynamo.gif)
Numbers are minima before SC No. I am not certain that my method was correct but it does confirm today’s news about weakening of Heliosphere by 25% in last 50 years.
WARNING: THESE ARE ONLY PRELIMINARY RESULTS!

[Birkeland]

~
Just grist for the mental mill, an impressive gallery of LARGE solar photos:

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/10/the_sun.html

~

Beautiful - thanks!

[rcglinsk]

As a part of my research into heliosperic current interaction with planetary magnetospheres I attempted to calculate relative value of solar dynamo's strength at times of solar minima. Preliminary results are shown on the graph.

(http://www.vukcevic.co.uk/solar_dynamo.gif)
Numbers are minima before SC No. I am not certain that my method was correct but it does confirm today’s news about weakening of Heliosphere by 25% in last 50 years.
WARNING: THESE ARE ONLY PRELIMINARY RESULTS!

If anyone read the recent thunderblog about the Alfven model of the sun... The data Vukcevic presents is just the kind of data one would expect if the Alfven model were correct. That model says that sunspots result from changes is the amperage of current flowing through the sun. As the sun varies from high to low states sunspots appear. While the current is static there are no sunspots. The data Vukckevic linked plots the "dynamo strength," ie, the amperage, at sunspot minimums. His amperage cycles from high to low states with sunspots happening in between. Aside from presenting very good evidence for the validity of the Alfven model, we can also see a general downtrend in current as of late, which could have effects we could look for throughout the solar system. The data may be preliminary, but that trend, of alternating high to low, is probably not going to change.

[vukcevic]

If anyone read the recent thunderblog about the Alfven model of the sun... The data Vukcevic presents is just the kind of data one would expect if the Alfven model were correct. That model says that sunspots result from changes is the amperage of current flowing through the sun. As the sun varies from high to low states sunspots appear. While the current is static there are no sunspots. The data Vukckevic linked plots the "dynamo strength," ie, the amperage, at sunspot minimums. His amperage cycles from high to low states with sunspots happening in between. Aside from presenting very good evidence for the validity of the Alfven model, we can also see a general downtrend in current as of late, which could have effects we could look for throughout the solar system. The data may be preliminary, but that trend, of alternating high to low, is probably not going to change.

rcglinsk
Thank you for your supporting comments. I was a bit sceptical about my results, data are based on properties of heliospheric current (which I assumed is proportional to the strength of the solar dynamo) at times of sunspot minima, rather than on the actual measurements of intensity of the surface magnetic field. The difference between odd and even cycles I found puzzling and thought there might be an error in the initial calculations. At first I was tempted to average two sets of data for even and odd cycles, but being firmly on the side of 22 year cycle, decided against it.

[GaryN]

Thought these space weather info dials interesting:

http://space.rice.edu/ISTP/justdials.html

Explanations for the dials:

http://space.rice.edu/ISTP/dialinterp.html

[MGmirkin]

a) Junglelord, Substance, rcglinsk:

What is the assertion that the heliosphere is "weaker" / "smaller" based upon? Actual measurements of the boundary, or just a "pressure" model of the heliosphere and the fact that solar wind "pressure" is down?

If the assertion is based upon a "pressure-only" model, treating the heliosphere like a balloon, is it anywhere close to correct when considering how the heliosphere works? Is the heliosphere / heliosheath some kind of impermeable barrier "inflated" by the solar wind, or something else (a Langmuir plasma sheath and/or double layer, etc)?

If "pressure" is not how the heliosphere operates, I'd want to see hard data on the "weakening" or "shrinking" of the heliospheric boundary before jumping on the mainstream bandwagon. IE, if they haven't actually measured the position / strength of the heliosheath, how can they say it's weakened / shrunk (unless it's simply an extension of a pressure-driven model which may or may not be correct)?

B) Vukcevic:

I'm not sure that a "hidden dynamo" model is correct for the sun. Most of the so-called "dynamo" models hide the source of the solar currents and magnetic fields "somewhere" within the sun, but are less-than-clear about exactly where it's located or how it got there or how it operates.

Generally they seem to assert there "something magnetic" deep inside the sun that's moving relative to the plasma in its upper layers and causing currents (as when you twirl a magnet in a coil of wire or other conductor). From the few sources I've read (I don't claim they're either complete or rigorous) it's usually referred to as a "lump of magnetism" or a "lump of magnetic field," which really doesn't make sense from the standpoint of Maxwell (basically saying that magnetic fields are some substance in and of themselves and can pile up or be maintained without currents) unless one assumes there's some kind of a solid permanent magnet down there. But that would seem to be precluded by the thermonuclear reactions supposedly going on in the core. Those should most certainly put the materials there in a plasma state through and through. Plasma generally can't be permanently magnetized, if I understand the various sources I've read. A current is required to sustain magnetic fields. Take the current out of the wire, or out of the conductor (such as plasma), and the magnetic field dwindles or collapses entirely. Materials past their Curie point shouldn't be able to be magnetic other than that induced by other magnets or by electric currents.

Cheers,
~Michael Gmirkin

[vukcevic]

...............
B) Vukcevic:
I'm not sure that a "hidden dynamo" model is correct for the sun. Most of the so-called "dynamo" models hide the source of the solar currents and magnetic fields "somewhere" within the sun, but are less-than-clear about exactly where it's located or how it got there or how it operates.............

Mr. Gmirkin
Having electronic background, I entirely agree with your assessment. The word dynamo in this case (and in case of planetary magnetism) perhaps should be written as ‘dynamo’ i.e. an inaccurate but familiar description of not entirely understood source of magnetic field

[MGmirkin]

Ahh yes, ye olde 'quotation fingers'... *wink*

Very good. ;o]

Now, I seem to recall from a conversation I had with a skeptic / pseudoskeptic once that pressure, density and temperature are in some ways related, and that they may play a role in what phase / state a substance is in. So, I'm not entirely sure how that would play into the "internal dynamo" theory. IE, at sufficiently high pressures they claim exist in the center of the sun (though they've never proven it by going to the center of the sun and sampling the material there ;o] ), would it be possible to effectively "magnetize" plasma? IE, would it phase transition to some other state gas, liquid, solid, "hot ice" (IE, extremely high temperature "solid" version of something that would usually be a liquid gas or plasma ad lower densitites), etc?

Just wondering out loud. Playing my own devil's advocate...

~Michael