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Sun’s Magnetic Pole Flip Shown In NASA Visualization
Friday, December 6, 2013 16:14
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This visualization shows the position of the sun’s magnetic fields from January 1997 to December 2013. The field lines swarm with activity: The magenta lines show where the sun’s overall field is negative and the green lines show where it is positive. Additional gray lines represent areas of local magnetic variation.
Image Credit: NASA/GSFC/PFSS
The entire sun’s magnetic polarity, flips approximately every 11 years — though sometimes it takes quite a bit longer — and defines what’s known as the solar cycle. The visualization shows how in 1997, the sun shows the positive polarity on the top, and the negative polarity on the bottom. Over the next 12 years, each set of lines is seen to creep toward the opposite pole eventually showing a complete flip. By the end of the movie, each set of lines are working their way back to show a positive polarity on the top to complete the full 22 year magnetic solar cycle.
At the height of each magnetic flip, the sun goes through periods of more solar activity, during which there are more sunspots, and more eruptive events such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections, or CMEs. The point in time with the most sunspots is called solar maximum.
Contacts and sources:
Karen C. Fox
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Source: http://www.ineffableisland.com/2013/12/nasa-visualization-shows-suns-magnetic.html
In the time of the Cosmos, this surely must be Bush’s fault. No one could have thought he was so diabolical to put this type of threat during the administration of the “One”.
Of course, if you do not have a brain, or have a brain and choose not to use it, the above comment is true.
Otherwise, it is an interesting stellar phenomena. One that we, on the 3rd rock from THIS sun, can only appreciate now because we are smart enough to.