The sun's magnetic field is about to flip

[gleenn]

Interestingly this happens every 11 years and also their is a longer cycle called the Hale cycle which is double the length at 22 years. It flips from a mostly dipole where the poles match the orientation of earth to a reverse and much more irregular magenetic orientation. I didn't see anything about how this really affects Earth directly other than what I knew previously about sun spots make Coronal Mass Ejections sometimes towards Earth. Think we had a few things happen recently due to those but nothing too crazy.

[anilakar]

Is it related to the 11 year sunspot cycle or just a coincidence?

[hn_throwaway_99]

My understanding is that the Hale cycle is just a complete "360° flip" of 2 "180° flips". I.e. the 11 year cycle is essentially going from "mostly dipole" (but say with north magnetic direction going one way) to irregular and then back to mostly dipole, but this time with magnetic north pointing in the opposite direction. The next 11 year cycle gets magnetic north pointing back "up" again.

[Galatians4_16]

Mostly affects cloud formation [1]

1. https://home.web.cern.ch/news/news/physics/cloud-discovers-n...

[stanislavb]

Thank you so much. I came to the comments looking for a similar explanation.

[temp0826]

I think there is a more interesting (and longer scale) trend that is less talked about, that the last couple solar cycles have been overall less intense (less activity/spots at the maximums)-

http://solen.info/solar/images/comparison_recent_cycles.png

I wish that chart went further back to see if there is a greater cycle at play. At a glance it looks like this cycle is a slight rebound over the last.

[c0brac0bra]

I recall back a few years reading some articles speaking about the sun entering in a Grand Solar Minimum cycle similar to the Maunder minimum, and that the result could be global cooling, etc.

Not sure if there's been additional research or conjecture since then.

[drmpeg]

> I wish that chart went further back to see if there is a greater cycle at play.

There is a chart of all observed cycles on the same website.

http://www.solen.info/solar/cycles1_to_present.html

[Apocryphon]

So going off of the previous HN thread, I thought we were due for a Carrington event a month ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40321821). Will this next bout of astronomical magnetic phenomena pose a threat to technological civilization as we know it?

[ben_w]

Perhaps. The Carrington event was 2-4 times as strong as the one last month, but on the other hand it also looks like most of the electrical systems are a lot more resilient than they used to be.

[teepo]

I'm having trouble parsing tfa; does this mean the sun is at "solar maximum" now, and does this also mean we may be in for some more frequent and intense auroras?

[photochemsyn]

You can see the sunspot cycle progression here, looks like solar maximum will last a year or two:

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/solar-cycle-progression

[wtallis]

Yes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_2024_solar_storms and https://xkcd.com/2930/

[ck2]

(it's gradual and takes five years, not like a day)

[HumblyTossed]

But that doesn't earn you a lot of clicks...

[cko]

> One side effect of the magnetic field shift is slight but primarily beneficial: It can help shield Earth from galactic cosmic rays — high-energy subatomic particles that travel at near light speed and can damage spacecraft and harm orbiting astronauts who are outside Earth's protective atmosphere.

Buried three sentences from the end of the article, after a wall of ads and filler (I'm impatient).

[nomel]

Why? Is it because the poles are aligned with earths, complimenting our own magnetic field?

It appears the magnetic poles are in continuous rotation [1], that sometimes aligns to the rotational poles and sometimes doesn't, with a "flip" event being the binary classification from the slow and smooth traversal over the equator. I feel silly, but I always assumed it was from some more fairly sharp step in the rate of change!

[1] https://www.stce.be/news/211/welcome.html

[andrewfurey2003]

Thanks

[whaleofatw2022]

... interesting question though..

Is this related to why my part of the US has had UV notices lately?

[casenmgreen]

I recall a few years ago a what seemed to be ground-breaking white paper from I think a Russian scientist, who argued (and convincingly) that there are two cycles at work, one deep in the Sun, the other shallow. The co-incidence of these two cycles both being at maximum, or both being at minimum, explaining the extremes of solar activity.

[hscontinuity]

We know so much and yet so little. The writing is in the article stating how mathematically they have no model, therefore they cannot truly understand it yet (researchers/academics).

This is true for climate change and it's own challenges along with many other applications of similar nature where models are incomplete or entirely missing large portions of data needed to further true understanding of a given process.

[teamonkey]

As is common in physics, a subject can be extremely well studied, theories can be produced, models can be created that predict future behaviour incredibly precisely, but because we can’t poke it hard enough or with enough precision the exact underlying mechanism remains unconfirmed.

[mandibeet]

The sentiment captures the essence of the human pursuit of knowledge...

[mordae]

So... What's the range and how do we modulate it?

[MadnessASAP]

The range would be awesome, but the city took pretty significant offense to my plan to setup a 11 lightyear dipole antenna on my property.

It's a hard life being an amateur radio operator these days...

[somat]

Which made me think. I would expect other stars to do this. Would magnetic polarity be detectable at interstellar distances? could novel astronomy* be done on stars this way?

* Does the magnetic flip period tell us anything about the star that would otherwise be hard to figure out.

[andoando]

Its so perplexing to me how the laws of physics replicates simple properties into massive scales.

[mensetmanusman]

That makes all of us.

[localfirst]

so then i wonder why do people struggle with the impact of polar shifts on climate?

[phillias]

And so is the Earth's. The poles have been traveling to meet together in the Indian Ocean

[Etherlord87]

The article says the transition takes 2-5 years and happens every 11 years. Isn't the title a clickbait then?

[alfor]

The earth too it seem, but on a longer timeframe.

Does someone here know more about this?

[emporas]

Earth's magnetic field rotates in irregular intervals. The terrifying part is, the time it takes to complete the rotation, the different intermediate magnetic poles cancel each other out, and we are left with a much smaller magnetic field overall. As low as 10% of what earth has today.

Astrum's channel on youtube has several pictures and complete analysis[1]. (I have downloaded the whole channel on my computer, that's the filename.)

[1] How The Earth Got Its Magnetic Field (And Why It Might Not Protect Us Much Longer)

[mr_toad]

As the sea floor plates that are being created in the mid ocean ridges cool the magnetic orientation is recorded in the alignment of particles in the newly frozen rock.

We can see alternating bands of polarity in the rock that show what the orientation was over geological time. The bands that spread outward from the ridges are separated by millions of years and provide a clear picture of sea floor spreading, and continental drift.

[Aspos]

Can one use Sun's magnetic field for navigation? I imagine Sun compass would be far more precise than Earth compass, no?

[contravariant]

You want something to make it easier to find the sun?

Anyway the sun's magnetic fields is ridiculously weak on earth.

[NikhilVerma]

I wonder what the astrologers have to say about this

[telotortium]

Don't post ChatGPT-generated summaries here - I got told off by the mods for doing it before.

[nonethewiser]

Is there any correlation between these cycles and earth temperature?

This seems to suggest yes?

> The atmospheric temperature spike, which was caused by successive geomagnetic storms, suggests the "solar maximum" is fast approaching.

https://www.space.com/earths-thermosphere-highest-temperatur...

And would something like El Nino be included in this effect or is it separate?

Don't get me wrong - the earth has obviously been getting warmer for a long time now. But the narrative on the cause of recent high temps seems way over-simplified.

[P_I_Staker]

It's just really sad to see all in the storys about the ends of earth. Every thing a new day to kill us. Now were to be wiped out enterirely.

[defrost]

It's not a story about the end of the earth.

It's a story about a regular recurring solar phenomenon.

[BurningFrog]

Relax. Humanity has always produced stories about the ends of earth, and we always will.

It's just something we do.

[nikso]

If you're open to exiting an novel theories on why this happens, check out Dr. Robitaille liquid sun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUZ0Obpihbc

[raylad]

Very interesting hypothesis. Anyone here with more expertise want to comment?

The summary is that the sun is actually metallic hydrogen, which forms a lattice similar to layers of graphite. This both explains the black-body radiation of the sun and provides a mechanism to explain sunspots and the solar maximum and pole flip: sunspots are non-hydrogen elements that are excluded from the metallic hydrogen lattice and push it upwards as they migrate to the surface and are ejected.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

I was just about to suggest the same thing.

Here's a related Veritasium episode: "The Bizarre Behavior of Rotating Bodies"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VPfZ_XzisU