What’s up with the Sun?
Just lately our Sun seems to be going through a period of intense activity regarding Sunspots.
Our Sun is a star. It is not ‘burning’, it’s not ‘on fire’, but instead it is like a giant nuclear reactor. Inside its core hydrogen atoms are being fused together to make helium atoms at the rate of about four million tonnes per second. When each atom of helium is produced it gives off masses of photon energy that must slowly make its way through many layers toward the surface. So slowly in fact that after the photons have been released at the centre of the Sun it can take between 10,000 and 170,000 years for them to reach the surface.
Once the photon eventually makes its way onto the surface of the Sun it finally escapes as visible light and heat, the light from the Sun takes about eight minutes to travel through space to reach the Earth. The surface of the Sun is not solid like the surface of the Earth; it is a swirling mass of unimaginable energy constantly changing writhing and twisting about. It also creates a gigantic mass of charged magnetic areas.
These heavily charged magnetic areas appear as dark spots on the Sun and are known as sunspots. Sunspots are huge in size, much bigger than the Earth and although they appear as dark areas, they are only dark in relation to the surrounding light from the Sun. If you could isolate a sunspot from the Sun it would still be shining extremely brightly. If the Sun is either very low down on the horizon or obscured by thin cloud then sunspots can even be seen with the naked eye and so their existence has been known about for thousands of years before the invention of the telescope.
Sunspots always appear in pairs and when they appear huge loops of material known as solar prominence stream from one of them out into space and then loop back into the other. But sometimes the prominence is so big that it snaps like a huge rubber band and instead of looping back it throws the material out into the solar system at a speed of a million miles an hour. This magnetic ‘wind’ then travels through space until it strikes the Earth 93 hours later where it is attracted by our North and South magnetic poles and produces the Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights.
The Northern Lights can normally be seen only in the far north (and south) regions of the Earth as bands or curtains of multi-coloured lights dancing across the sky. But recently the Sun has been producing far more intense sunspots that have caused the Northern Lights to be seen much further south across northern England. Last week areas as far south as Birmingham have been reporting seeing the Northern Lights.
It’s not unusual for sunspot activity to fall and rise. Sunspots generally have an 11 year cycle when no sunspots are seen on the sun as it was a few years ago to the peak that we are experiencing now where there are masses of huge sunspots littering the surface. Although all this solar activity will go unnoticed by most people, it will cause you no harm at all; it can be lethal for electrical systems and satellites out in space. In the past it has been known to knock out electrical transmission pylons and other sensitive electrical systems. Precautions have to be taken to protect satellites in space to prevent them from overloading with all this magnetic flux.
It is possible for you to see these sunspots using a telescope or binoculars. CAUTION: NEVER LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE SUN USING A TELESCOPE OR BINOCULARS! To look at the sun safely use the projection method. Point your telescope or binoculars at the sun then hold a piece of white card about 12” (30cm) behind the lens allowing the image of the sun to be projected onto the card. Focus the image onto the card and you will clearly see the dark sunspots scattered across the surface.
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