What's wrong with the sun?

[rayofreason]

SUNSPOTS come and go, but recently they have mostly gone. For centuries, astronomers have recorded when these dark blemishes on the solar surface emerge, only for them to fade away again after a few days, weeks or months. Thanks to their efforts, we know that sunspot numbers ebb and flow in cycles lasting about 11 years.

But for the past two years, the sunspots have mostly been missing. Their absence, the most prolonged for nearly a hundred years, has taken even seasoned sun watchers by surprise. "This is solar behaviour we haven't seen in living memory," says David Hathaway, a physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

The sun is under scrutiny as never before thanks to an armada of space telescopes. The results they beam back are portraying our nearest star, and its influence on Earth, in a new light. Sunspots and other clues indicate that the sun's magnetic activity is diminishing, and that the sun may even be shrinking. Together the results hint that something profound is happening inside the sun. The big question is what?



http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627640.800-whats-wrong-with-the-sun.html?page=1

[grantcart]

1. Based on the last 50 years of abuse to the planet by its inhabitants the

Sun is reconsidering whether sending more energy our way is really in our best interest.

[TriMera]

2. Maybe it's trying to say,

"Use it or lose it".

[CrispyQ]

3. Good one.

:applause:

[phantom power]

4. hopefully it isn't one of those things where it's building up a bunch of magnetic tension...

and then it pukes up a huge X-class flare on us and burns out the electric grid of the northern hemisphere.

Yes, hope it isn't that.

[Orrex]

5. Try to be optimistic about it.

Maybe it'll happen at night.

[TheMadMonk]

7. Depends on whether the power grid operators heed warnings or not.

Between SOHO, STEREO and a few other satellites we've good a bloody good chance of spotting such a nasty while it's on its way.

Then it's just a matter of deliberately shutting down the grid and isolating its many parts from each other for a few hours. This might seem a little drastic, but it beats all hell out of the alternative: Megavolt currents destroying generators, electronic switches, appliances, even whole lengths of cabling. And a recovery time measured in months or even longer.

[shireen]

6. global warming?

:P

[Phoonzang]

8. Oh noes, we're going to have to send a spaceship to restart the sun.

We'll have to battle a horrible scarred sun-worshiping madman on the way though.