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NASA: Sun’s Solar Wind at a 50-Year Low
NASA will hold a media teleconference Tuesday, Sept. 23, at 12:30 p.m. EDT, to discuss data from the joint NASA and European Space Agency Ulysses mission that reveals the sun’s solar wind is at a 50-year low. The sun’s current state could result in changing conditions in the solar system.
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2008/sep/HQ_M08176_Ulysses_teleconference.html
BBC News website: Solar wind blows at 50-year low
“The entire Sun is blowing significantly less hard – about 20-25% less hard – than it was during the last solar minimum 10-15 years ago.
“That’s a very significant change. In fact, the solar wind we’re seeing now is blowing the least hard we’ve see it for a prolonged time, since the start of those observations in the 1960s at the start of the space age.”
In addition to being calmer, the wind measured at Ulysses is 13% cooler.
However, judging from Sun activity data collected by non-satellite methods over the past 200 years, the current behaviour is thought to be well within the long-term norm.
Some researchers have attempted to link the intensity of cosmic rays at Earth to cloudiness and climate change. Current conditions may be a good opportunity to test these ideas further.
October 1st, 2008 at 10:57 pm
As an electrical engineer, I would like to quote from another, Dr.Donald E.Scott in his 2006 book “Electric Sky”:
http://www.electric-cosmos.org/
“A flow of ions constitutes an electric current, not a wind.”
That astrophysicists persist in ignoring an interpretation of the universe based on plasma science is simply another example of big science gone astray. Plasma science, demonstrated in many experiments carried out here on earth over the last century, explains many phenomena that continue to surprise astrophysicists when observed in space. The acceleration of the “solar wind” with increasing distance from the sun is easily explained if electric fields are present in the plasma of space. The application of electric fields is the method by which particle accelerators work.
The variation of electric fields is the simple explanation of why the “solar wind” varies or stops sometimes.
Cosmology has gone astray for similar reasons as climate science, namely the politics of scientists and the vested interests of dominant groups amongst them to hold on to their dear long held theories and lucrative research positions.
October 1st, 2008 at 11:52 pm
Sounds like ‘the electric universe’:
http://www.the-electric-universe.info/