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Solar Flair: Our sun is always noisy, and scientists say that the clatter will get even louder as it enters a new cycle
NASA Lamscan Image
The Ulysses solar spacecraft travels over the sun's "north pole" to capture valuable scientific images.
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Published: May 12, 2008
What's that crackling noise? It's the voice of the sun.
That's right, our neighboring star is making plenty of clatter, and scientists expect it to get louder this year after the start of a new solar cycle. The racket is likely to cause disruptions to cell phones and the world's satellite communications and power grids.
"The analogy is like popping popcorn," said David H. Hathaway, a solar physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. "We've heard the first pop and then it's going to be bam, bam, ba-bam!"
The sun shifts gears about every 11 years in what is called a solar cycle -- a reversal of its magnetic field. This creates periods of relative quiet or tumultuous upheaval.
Never before have scientists been so well armed to study this big ball of nuclear fusion. One reason is Ulysses, an 18-year-old spacecraft currently above the sun's north pole. No craft has ever been in this position at the beginning of a solar cycle.
"This is a wonderful opportunity to examine the sun's north pole within a transition of cycles," said Arik Posner, a program scientist with the Ulysses mission. "We've never done this before."
In the meantime, scientists are observing the appearance of small, dark blotches on the surface, called sunspots. Appearing dark because they are cooler than the surrounding surface, they act much like tornadoes on Earth. The first spot of the new cycle, observed Jan. 4, is an "early omen of solar storms that will gradually increase over the next few years," said Doug Biesecker, a physicist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Colorado.
Sunspots indicate violence brew
ing just under the sun's surface. The turbulence creates gigantic bubbles of energy called coronal mass ejections, which tear away from the surface and head our way, creating all sorts of atmospheric static. On occasion, such events knock out power in cities around the world. A well-known such event happened in 1989, when a solar burst left much of the Canadian province of Quebec without electricity for six days.
"Coronal mass ejections are explosive," Hathaway said. "They send billions of tons of matter blasting off from the sun at a million miles an hour."
And as people become more and more dependent on satellite communications, solar upheavals will zap more telephone conversations.
"One thing that hits closer to home is our cell phones," Hathaway said. "Some of the sun's emissions happen to be on the same frequency as cell phones, and during a big flare with a lot of radio emissions, you might have conversations breaking up."
On a more serious scale, solar bursts can disable satellites that provide GPS navigation and weather forecasts, and force airlines to divert routes.
"The bigger the cycle, the more technological problems we will have," Hathaway said. "That means more airlines have to avoid going over poles to get from New York to Beijing. And it costs airlines a lot more money to take a circuitous route."
■ Kurt Loft is a staff writer for The Tampa Tribune in Florida.
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