The Sun's missing spots

The CGC Communicator, the newsletter for broadcast engineering professionals in California, has just published this interesting article titled 'The Sun's missing spots'.

The 11-year solar sunspot cycle has been clicking along for decades. Then, all of a sudden, something that was not predicted happened. During the past few years, there have been very few sunspots. In fact, we have had 800 days with no sunspots and that has not happened in 300 years.
This could have profound implications for worldwide weather patterns to say nothing of HF radio propagation in the 3-30 MHz region.

The last time the Sun was this quiet was between the years 1645 and 1715 and it was called the Maunder Minimum. Paintings from that era show wintry weather in areas where it's not typical, like carnivals held on frozen rivers and people playing on the ice. There are historical accounts of rivers in Europe frozen over, and civilizations almost perishing due to the harshness of winters....

http://tinyurl.com/MissingSunSpots-Part1
http://tinyurl.com/MissingSunSpots-Part2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum

Flashback to CGC #1013 published June 28, 2010:

The 11-year sunspot cycle appears to be heavily influenced by the positions of Uranus and Neptune. This discovery makes solar cycle predictions possible and indicates that solar cycles 24 & 25 will have "heavily reduced sunspot activity...."
http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.5303v1

End of flashback.

Keep in mind that although sunspots have vanished for now, some experts still believe they will make a rapid and sudden return later in the current cycle. Only time will tell.

CGC Communicator website
http://www.bext.com/_CGC/

Our thanks to Mike Terry for spotting this item

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