Jan. 16, 2008 -- The small black spot that broke out on the sun's face just after New Year's hardly seems like something to get worked up about. The sun develops spots as regularly as teenagers sprout acne, and by the end of last week, it had already faded from view.
What caught scientists' attention was the spot's location and the direction of its magnetic field, features that separate this speck from all others that have appeared over the last 11 years or so.
This spot, number 10,981 since government labeling began on Jan. 5, 1972, is the first of what may be a very active new cycle for our mother star.
Officially, the period is known as Solar Cycle 24, though the sun has been having cycles far longer than humans have been watching and recording the signs. The spots are closely tied to flares and great, volcanic-like eruptions of charged particles from the sun's atmosphere.
Experts are divided about whether Solar Cycle 24 will be a doozy or just average, but either way, the forecast for Earth is not good: satellite-dependent systems -- everything from automated teller machines at banks to Global Positioning System receivers in cars --face the prospect of disrupted service and complete outages during periods of increased solar storms.
"The difference in the technology in the 1980s and what we can expect in 2010 is huge," said solar physicist Doug Biesecker with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo.
"It's not just the reliance on satellite communications to control things like cell phones and ATMs. It's the use of GPS in many more functions: timing on financial transactions, by industry for farming, road-building, very high-accuracy surveying, deep ocean drilling...whether we have a small cycle or a big cycle," Biesecker told Discovery News.
The appearance of the first sunspot associated with the new cycle does not resolve the dispute between experts about what the sun has in store for the next 11 years.
Biesecker, who chaired a panel that was asked to come up with a forecast, said the group remains evenly split. One side predicts the sun's peak activity will occur in October 2011, with about 140 spots, and the other half expects a somewhat later and less intense solar max in August 2012, with 90 spots.
"We're all pretty entrenched in our position," Biesecker said. "One camp will clearly have egg on its face when this is over."
Related Links:
Irene Klotz's blog: Space Diary
NASA's Sun-Earth Connection Forum
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