Solar Cycle 24 - Headed For Intense X Flares By 2010 - 2012?

Dear Friends,

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Be Well, Be Love.

David

Solar Cycle 24 - Headed for Intense X Flares by 2010-2012?
ÃÂà ƒÂ‚Ã‚Â‚ÃƒÂƒÃ‚ÂƒÃƒÂ‚Ã‚Â‚Ãƒ ƒÂ‚© 2006 by Linda Moulton Howe

"Researchers from the University of Colorado believe the next solar cycle
(Solar Cycle 24)

will be the most intense in 50 years." - NASA, August 15, 2006
August 23, 2006 Huntsville, Alabama - As long as humans have been studying
our sun, observers have noticed that the sun goes through reoccurring cycles
that last about eleven years. For instance, most recently the year 2000 was a
solar maximum of sunspots. After that, sunspots were supposed to decline in size
and number to a solar minimum in 2005 before starting over again with an upswing
in sunspot activity to another solar maximum in 2010 to 2012. During solar
maximums, there can be powerful flares, or coronal mass ejections, that propel
intense solar radiation at a million mph through the solar system. The power of
a solar flare is the energy equivalent of a million megatons of TNT, or ten
million Hiroshima bombs. During the most recent solar minimum, there were a
number of unexpected huge sunspots that unleashed gigantic X class flares when
the sun was supposed to be quiet. X class flares are the strongest category.
That unusually intense activity during a solar
minimum left many people wondering if the next solar cycle, the 24th, will be
especially strong?

The beginning of an answer to that question might have emerged three weeks ago
on July 31st when a small sunspot in the sun?s southern hemisphere was
magnetically backward. That got the serious attention of astrophysicist, David
Hathaway, who is the Solar Physics Team Leader at the NASA Marshall Space Flight
Center in Huntsville, Alabama. He has been studying the sun for more than twenty
years. Dr. Hathaway has become convinced after more than a dozen solar cycles
that there is a grand pattern of sunspot polarities. In the sun?s northern
hemisphere, all sunspots are oriented south to north. In the southern
hemisphere, all spots are north to south. That?s how it has been for the past
ten years during Solar Cycle 23.

When Cycle 24 arrives ? the grand pattern will flip. Northern sunspots will
become north to south, while those in the south will change south to north. This
magnetic flipping action occurs every time one solar cycle gives way to another.

That little July 31st sunspot emerged in the southern hemisphere with its
magnetic poles backward in the south to north position ? perhaps a harbinger
that the next solar cycle is beginning.



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