Sunspots are back

Looks like the Sun is in its teens again

[Via Bad Astronomy]

I’ve been posting sporadically on how sunspots are starting to come back to the Sun, and I’m glad to see a new group sprouted up recently… and it’s a monster:

These images are from SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. The orange one is in visible light, and the sunspots are pretty obvious. The green one shows the Sun in the far ultraviolet, and you can see the sunspots are pretty intense, blasting out high-energy light. Sunspots are indicators of magnetic activity, and the intense magnetic field can accelerate plasma (ionized gas) to high energies.

Just so’s you know, a hundred Earths could fit across this image, so that oughta give you an idea of just how big these blemishes are.

[More]

We have gone though a very extended lull from the end of Cycle 23 to the start of 24. Longer than anything seen since the beginning of the 20th Century. Perhaps now the sun will get back to its normal cycle. Another Maunder minimum does not appear to be in the cards. This nice figure from NASA shows the possible trajectory:

Things are beginning to move along the predicted tracks now, with radio flux also increasing (also from NASA):

It does not look like it will be a big cycle so maybe we won’t have to worry about power outages due to large solar flares. We shall see how good the predictions are.

Perhaps if we could just get the new observatory, the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), up into space we might learn a lot more. At least it is not snowing at the launch pad.

I wonder if that is why maple syrup tastes better?

by DNAMichaud

Isotopes and Maple Syrup
[Via Climate Change]

I thought that this article was interesting, discussing this recent paper in the Journal of Agricultural and Food chemistry. The analysis revealed that the relative amount of carbon-13 in maple syrup have gone down since the 1970s, which they attribute to changing isotopic signatures from fossil fuel burning in the atmosphere. Discussion and implications for the food industry in the article.

[More]

Two nonradioactive isotopes of carbon are found in plants. Carbon 13 is usually about 1% of the carbon molecules in plants. BUt researchers looking at various sugars have refined it even more.

Maple syrup comes from plants that have about 108 molecules of 13C out of 10,000 carbon molecules. Plants, like corn have 110. They test the rations to make sure someone is not using cheap corn syrup in the expensive maple syrup. If so, the 13C ratio would be off.

These researchers have shown that the 13C rations have decreased about 0.2 molecule per 10,000 over the last 40 years or so, suggesting that the 13C amounts have changed, with less 13C being present in the atmosphere for the plants to use. This is exactly what one would expect from anthropogenic climate change,as burning fossil fuels, which is derived from plant materials, would add a greater amount of 12C than 13C. Thus the decrease in 13C ratios over the years.

I wonder if you could taste the difference in 13C concentrations?

Of course, it appears that the New England sugar maple could be a thing of the past in a few years. Looks like Canada will be the only place to get real maple syrup.

[Listening to: 905 from the album "Who Are You (Remastered)" by The Who]

[Listening to: The Frozen Logger from the album "The Tin Angel" by Odetta and Larry]