Guest essay by David Archibald
This essay provides a series of graphs that describe the current state of the sun in context with its history.
Figure 1: Oulu Neutron Count 1964 – 2014
Cosmic rays are pushed away, to some extent, from the inner planets of the solar system by the Sun’s magnetic field carried in the solar wind.
Cosmic rays are mostly protons and alpha particles with some electrons and the nuclei of heavier elements. The highest energy cosmic rays have energies comparable to the energy of a 90 kmph baseball. As they hit oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere, they cause a shower of neutrons. The neutron count from this source follows the solar cycle with about a one year lag, reflecting the time it takes for the solar wind to reach the heliopause. There is a connection with climate in that the atoms hit by the…
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There is little or no doubt that the flux of cosmic rays (and the secondary neutrons they produce in the upper atmosphere) is high when the number of sunspots is low.
That is an empirical fact.
Two unanswered question:
1. Do these “cosmic rays” come from the Sun’s pulsar core ?
OR
2. Does the Sun’s magnetic field push cosmic rays away from the Earth?
Here is empirical evidence for the Sun’s pulsar core: “Solar energy,” Advances in Astronomy (submitted 1 Sept 2014) https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/Solar_Energy.pdf
If NASA wanted the public to understand the Sun, NASA would make available graphs of changes in the wavelength of light over the solar cycles, e.g., changes in ratios of
1. UV/VIS
2. VIS/IR
Etc
I was unable to post a comment at http://wchildblog.com/2014/10/27/nasa-revisiting-our-vulnerabiity-to-solar-flares/
but the NASA astrophysicist, Dr. Lika Guhathakurta, may know the Sun’s pulsar core causes solar eruptions:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/r2352635vv166363/ http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0501441 http://www.omatumr.com/abstracts2003/jfe-superfluidity.pdf
She might lose her position at NASA if she admitted that fact in public.