Posted on 02/08/2023 8:11:16 AM PST by BenLurkin
A huge filament of solar plasma has broken off the sun's surface and is circling its north pole like a vortex of powerful winds, but scientists have no clue what caused it.
Scott McIntosh, a solar physicist and deputy director at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, told Space.com that while he has never seen a vortex like this, something odd is happening at the sun's 55 degree latitudes with clockwork regularity once every solar cycle, the 11-year period characterized by an ebb and flow in the generation of sunspots and eruptions.
The prominence...that McIntosh describes as a "hedgerow in the solar plasma", appears exactly at the 55 degree latitude around the sun's polar crowns every 11 years. Scientists know that it has something to do with the reversal of the sun's magnetic field that happens once every solar cycle, but they have no clue what drives it.
Scientists have regularly observed filaments tear away from this pole-embracing plasma hedgerow, but they have yet to see it form such a polar whirlwind until now.
Scientists know that the sun's polar regions play a key role in the generation of the star's magnetic field, which, in turn, drives its 11-year cycle of activity. They couldn't, however, observe that region directly.
The European Space Agency Solar Orbiter mission may shed some light on this odd phenomenon in the coming years. The mission, which is taking images of the sun from within the orbit of Mercury, will have its orbit tilted by up to 33 degrees.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
“appears exactly at the 55 degree latitude around the sun’s polar crowns every 11 years”
What a coincidence. California alternates between drought and plentiful rain every 11 years.
Come on, Man!...It’s all right there in the memo- “Trust the science!”
How Long Does It Take for Photons to Emerge From the Sun's Core to the Outside?
poler vortex...
Don’t be scared, be prepared!!
The core of Sol is where compressive forces are at their greatest, sufficient to produce and continuously sustain nuclear fusion. A fusion reaction that occurs at the very center of the sun produces protons that have to travel over 432,000 miles “as the crow flies” to reach the surface of the sun and race radially outward therefrom in the form of visible light. Admittedly the 500,000 year number seems unlikely but IIRC that’s how the math works out in terms of the immense density, “bouncing”, random directionality, and other mind-bending obstacles that any given photon so produced will face in its path toward freedom.
Okay, 5,000 years. Be that way! LOL😉
Forewarned is forearmed.
Do they get thundersnow on the sun?
“a “hedgerow in the solar plasma”,”
Wait’ll you get a look at the hedgehogs...
I think with some common sense regulations and a progressive tax structure, we can probably stop this from happening again.
“scientists have no clue what caused it”
Well, it’s caused by Birkeland currents.
Climate Change or a new COVID variant if not those a Russian conspiracy or perhaps a Chinese plot.
There are plenty of MSM talking points that could be added to this story.
Something similar is going on inside all the other stars in the galaxy, and in all the stars in billions of other galaxies. Hard to calculate how many photons that adds up to. More than the number of dollars in the national debt, at any rate.
Who knew there was a number bigger than that? LOL
Hard for us to calculate, for sure.
Safe to say, though, that someone is “in the know” on that score.
The ultimate BigWig.
That’s 2.3 seconds (432,000/186,000) at the speed of light in a vacuum (supposedly) A photon prob. takes less that 10 seconds to reach the sun’s surface if that’s true!
The Random Walk
Imagine there’s a guy so drunk that he needs to hold on to a light post to stand up. He wants to get to the next light post, just 10 steps away, but he’s so drunk that he can’t walk in a straight line. Heck, he’s so drunk that after he takes one step his next step could be in any other direction. That’s what physicists and mathematicians call a “drunkard’s walk” or “random walk” problem. The question is, how long will it take that guy to get from one lamppost to the next? The answer is that if his starting point and ending point are separated by 10 steps, it will take him — on average — 100 steps to get there — that’s 10 squared. That’s the same situation a gamma ray faces in the core of the sun.
Assumptions
When you’re trying to solve a random-walk problem, the most important thing you need to know is how big the steps are. There are two problems with figuring that out for a gamma ray photon in the sun. First, conditions are not the same all throughout the sun, so the distance between gamma ray “crashes” with other particles changes. Second, no one has ever visited the center of the sun, so some assumptions need to be made, anyway. There are all sorts of reasonable assumptions, varying from one-tenth of a millimeter to about a centimeter. The choice of this distance has a big impact on the time calculation.
How Long it Takes
The radius of the sun is 700,000 kilometers, which is 7 trillion “steps” if each step is a tenth of a millimeter, and 70 billion steps if each step is 1 centimeter. From the drunkard’s-walk problem, you know that the average number of steps it takes to get a certain distance is equal to the square of the number of steps it would take to go in a straight line. So it would take 49 trillion trillion steps of 0.1 millimeter and 490 billion trillion steps of 1 centimeter each. The time it takes to travel those steps is the total distance divided by the speed of light. So, if you think photons only travel 0.1 millimeters between crashes, it will take more than half a million years for the photon to escape the sun. If you think it’s about a centimeter, then it will take about 5,000 years for the photon to get outside the sun.
Thundersnow, I doubt it. But this could cause a sharknado.
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