My sun is having a mid-life crisis.
No, that’s not a spelling mistake, I really do mean the bright shiny yellow thing that the ancient Norsemen believed to be driven round the sky each day in its golden chariot to escape a hungry wolf. Mind you they also believed that a giant cow, Audumla by name, and some ice blocks were created out of nothing and gods and man came into being as a result of the thirsty cow licking the ice blocks. It is not clear how the giant cow came into being. Nor the ice blocks.
Modern physics has exposed such bunkum. It believes that everything, including time, was created in an enormous explosion that lasted no time at all. It is not clear how the thing that exploded came into being. And that’s how we got stars. Some of which exploded. And we eventually got cows from the bits that came out of the exploding stars. Oh, and we got ice blocks the same way. And the ancient Norsemen too, which is (almost) where we came in.
Back to the sun. Today it is five billion years old. (Do I hear the strains of “Happy Birthday to you” from somewhere – ah, yes it’s my daughter’s Birthday – the sun’s age is approximate). At the rate it’s consuming fuel, that’s about half of its productive life. Now as human’s age, they slow down but stars like ours do the opposite, they heat up. Thanks to that, our earth will become too hot for life in about half a billion years, a comparatively short time when you think about the sun’s age, but not enough for you to think about changing your will. In fact, if we go back the same distance in time, there wasn't much more than single-celled creatures here on earth.
So what does a mid-life crisis for the Sun actually mean? One of the measures of its activity is the number of sun-spots in evidence, these are regions of turmoil on the Sun’s surface. There were virtually none for a couple of hundred years until 1850, when sun-spot activity suddenly restarted. During those two hundred years, earth cooled. The famous “Frost Fairs” were held annually on the frozen River Thames. During the 1990s sun spot activity began reducing again. What do you know, the earth has been getting cooler since its high of 1998 and even that was cooler apparently than in the time when Julius Caesar invaded Britain; supposedly one of the motivations for the invasion was for the great Caesar to get at Britain’s wine, something that wasn’t able to be made there after the early Middle Ages until the 1960s.
We’re in pretty vague territory here, but a number of mechanisms are believed to depend on sun-spot activity. Less activity means less energy leaving the sun in our direction and some believe that an indirect process causes more clouds to form which reflects some of the energy back out to space. Another mechanism that has increased cloud formation in the past has been, guess what, volcanic ash in the upper atmosphere and we’ve just had an incident that pumped tons of the stuff up there.
So where am I going with all this? Well, just perhaps, nature, in her infinite kindness and wisdom, has thrown us a lifeline or two to help counter the adverse consequences of our headlong rush to swamp our little home (recognize the planet Earth?) with energy.
If that is indeed the case, we should say a gracious “Thank You” and seek to make the best possible use of what may be nothing but a very brief respite. By definition a crisis is temporary and gets resolved, so we can expect the Sun to resume increasing its energy output soon.
No, that’s not a spelling mistake, I really do mean the bright shiny yellow thing that the ancient Norsemen believed to be driven round the sky each day in its golden chariot to escape a hungry wolf. Mind you they also believed that a giant cow, Audumla by name, and some ice blocks were created out of nothing and gods and man came into being as a result of the thirsty cow licking the ice blocks. It is not clear how the giant cow came into being. Nor the ice blocks.
Modern physics has exposed such bunkum. It believes that everything, including time, was created in an enormous explosion that lasted no time at all. It is not clear how the thing that exploded came into being. And that’s how we got stars. Some of which exploded. And we eventually got cows from the bits that came out of the exploding stars. Oh, and we got ice blocks the same way. And the ancient Norsemen too, which is (almost) where we came in.
Back to the sun. Today it is five billion years old. (Do I hear the strains of “Happy Birthday to you” from somewhere – ah, yes it’s my daughter’s Birthday – the sun’s age is approximate). At the rate it’s consuming fuel, that’s about half of its productive life. Now as human’s age, they slow down but stars like ours do the opposite, they heat up. Thanks to that, our earth will become too hot for life in about half a billion years, a comparatively short time when you think about the sun’s age, but not enough for you to think about changing your will. In fact, if we go back the same distance in time, there wasn't much more than single-celled creatures here on earth.
So what does a mid-life crisis for the Sun actually mean? One of the measures of its activity is the number of sun-spots in evidence, these are regions of turmoil on the Sun’s surface. There were virtually none for a couple of hundred years until 1850, when sun-spot activity suddenly restarted. During those two hundred years, earth cooled. The famous “Frost Fairs” were held annually on the frozen River Thames. During the 1990s sun spot activity began reducing again. What do you know, the earth has been getting cooler since its high of 1998 and even that was cooler apparently than in the time when Julius Caesar invaded Britain; supposedly one of the motivations for the invasion was for the great Caesar to get at Britain’s wine, something that wasn’t able to be made there after the early Middle Ages until the 1960s.
We’re in pretty vague territory here, but a number of mechanisms are believed to depend on sun-spot activity. Less activity means less energy leaving the sun in our direction and some believe that an indirect process causes more clouds to form which reflects some of the energy back out to space. Another mechanism that has increased cloud formation in the past has been, guess what, volcanic ash in the upper atmosphere and we’ve just had an incident that pumped tons of the stuff up there.
So where am I going with all this? Well, just perhaps, nature, in her infinite kindness and wisdom, has thrown us a lifeline or two to help counter the adverse consequences of our headlong rush to swamp our little home (recognize the planet Earth?) with energy.
If that is indeed the case, we should say a gracious “Thank You” and seek to make the best possible use of what may be nothing but a very brief respite. By definition a crisis is temporary and gets resolved, so we can expect the Sun to resume increasing its energy output soon.
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