If I were to tell you that the cycles of the Sun could affect your entire life,
you might think that I was suddenly taking a turn away from astronomy and into astrology.
While there are many people in the world who believe that you can learn
things about your future by studying the position of stars and planets, it’s not
a position I tend to take on this channel. I’m more interested in the beauty of space,
and the mechanisms that explain why it is the way it is. But sometimes, there is a grain of truth
behind even the most surprising of stories. So allow me to put on my prophesying hat.
While I’m no writer of horoscopes, I will predict that based on the current state of the Sun, over
the next few years you might be more likely to experience bad health, less reliable technology,
see warmer weather with fewer clouds, and possibly could be influenced in other surprising ways. How
do I know? Because it turns out the Sun, that giant ball of fire in our sky, is not just
the place we get our energy from. Science is starting to show that its 11-year cycles might
just be the metronome measuring out how life on our planet tick… Tick… Ticks. I’m Alex McColgan,
and you’re watching Astrum. Today we’re going to look at Sun cycles. In particular, I intend to
show you exactly how the cycles of the Sun are already influencing the course of your life.
It’s no surprise that the Sun is influential to life on Earth. After all, in many respects it
is life’s origin. Life on Earth needs energy to function, and the Sun frequently provides
that energy. Light for plants, plants for herbivores, herbivores for carnivores,
all the way up the food chain. It’s hard to find anything on Earth that could live without our Sun.
But beyond the gift of that life-sustaining energy, it’s easy to think of the Sun as fairly
static. We see it rise and fall in the sky, but we rarely notice it undergoing any sort of change.
This, however, is an illusion. The Sun changes all the time.
As science has advanced and we’ve been able to shield out the worst of the Sun’s glare,
it became possible to study the Sun’s surface. And as early as 1610 it became clear that the Sun was
a boiling, shifting sea of barely restrained plasma, which frequently wasn’t restrained.
In spite of the intense gravitational force holding it all together, the nuclear reactions
taking place in its core are so hot – reaching 15 million °C in its centre – that plasma bubbles
and bursts on its surface, erupting into solar flares that blaze in all directions.
Sunspots – dark patches of the Sun’s surface that are filled with intense magnetic fields and can be
between 1,600 and 160,000 km across – form, drift, and vanish. Coronal Mass Ejections (CME’s) explode
out of the Sun’s corona – the atmospheric zone above the Sun that is strangely 200 times hotter
than its surface. It’s hard to find a place in the solar system that is as active as the Sun.
What many people do not realise is that that activity waxes and wanes.
The Sun operates on an 11-year cycle that alternates between a period of low activity
(the solar minimum) to a much higher level (the solar maximum) and back again.
Sunspots, solar flares and CMEs all become more common during the solar maximum – you are 50
times more likely to see a solar flare during solar maximum compared to the Sun’s minimum,
and large CMEs go from happening once every few days to multiple times in a single day.
This is known as the Schwabe cycle. Interestingly, this represents one half
of a larger cycle known as the Hale cycle, which maps the changes in the Sun’s magnetic polarity.
Once every Schwabe cycle – every 11 years – the Sun’s magnetic North and South poles swap
places. When another Schwabe cycle occurs, the poles swap back. Tick, tick, tick. This constant
rising and falling of solar energy levels thrums through our planetary system, rising and falling
like a heartbeat. And surprisingly, even though we can’t see it, we here on Earth move to its rhythm.
We don’t really understand why the Sun goes through this cycle. It’s clearly related to
the magnetic processes that exists within the Sun itself. Yet, although we have observed these
cycles in action for the last two hundred years, and have seen evidence of their influence on the
Earth over the last 10 thousand, we’re still no closer to figuring out why the Sun’s cycle has a
length of that particular time period, rather than any other. What force drives it? Lacking
any other obvious answer, some scientists have tried to connect the orbital length
of Jupiter – also about 11 years – to this cycle length, but this could easily be a coincidence.
Although Jupiter represents 2.5 times the combined mass of all the other planets in the solar system,
and definitely exerts some gravitational pull on the Sun, its orbit cannot explain the variations
(seemingly random) that the Sun’s cycle undergoes. Much of what goes on within the Sun is a
mystery to us. But its influence on Earth? That is much easier to see.
It begins with the space around us. Space is more and more important to modern civilisation,
so it shouldn’t be surprising that CMEs and solar storms streaming out
from the Sun more regularly would have an impact on the technology we have up there.
Scientists are able to predict the arrival of a solar storm – known as a geomagnetic storm,
by the time it arrives at Earth – days or even weeks in advance. This allows astronauts to go
into safe shelters to hide themselves from harmful rises in radiation levels, and it also allows the
delicate hardware on satellites to be powered down to prevent that hardware from being fried.
This is important, as solar radiation can cause unexpected electrical currents to form in wiring,
overloading systems that haven’t gone into a safe standby mode. But there’s another aspect to
geomagnetic storms that you might not expect. All of that radiation has an impact on the atmosphere
itself. It warms it, albeit just a little. As the atmosphere warms, it expands, and this has
an impact on our satellites. In space, there is no drag, so objects can orbit practically forever.
Well; this isn’t entirely true, and satellites in Low Earth Orbit do occasionally – about 4
times a year – need to expend fuel to correct their orbits, as there is a tiny amount of
atmosphere up there. But when a geomagnetic storm occurs, the atmosphere blossoms upwards, and LEO
satellites have to manoeuvre every 2-3 weeks to keep from falling from the sudden friction.
And this isn’t always enough. In 1989 there was a geomagnetic storm that was so powerful, it knocked
the NASA Solar Maximum Mission out of the sky, as an increase in atmosphere suddenly slowed the
satellite down. Ironically, the mission had been studying solar flares . This is not an isolated
incident. NORAD (The Northern American Aerospace Defence Command) has to relocate hundreds of
satellites after each geomagnetic storm, as they have been knocked out of their old orbits.
Radiation can also influence our ionosphere, filling it with charged plasma.
This can have a slight lensing effect on our GPS systems, reducing their accuracy from
within a metre to over 10 metres. The next time you look on Google maps and it thinks
you might be a street across from where you are, a geomagnetic storm might be to blame.
Our power grids brace themselves every 11 years for the uptick in these current-inducing events,
to keep themselves from being overloaded. Amateur radio enthusiasts and airline pilots
find their High Frequency Radio range dropping significantly, as radio waves
get deflected or even blocked completely by the more powerfully charged ionosphere.
As I predicted in my horoscope, this all adds up to some less reliable technology – the fact that
the next solar maximum is expected to arrive soon, in 2025, makes me quite confident in
my prophesying. There are some bright sides to this. As space weather becomes more turbulent,
parts of the world such as Canada see a rise in the number of auroras dancing
hypnotically across the sky. Aurora chasers report rises in sightings from a few times
a year to as many as twice a month, during the most energetic parts of the Sun’s 11-year cycle.
So much for the Sun’s influence on space and our technology. You might think that that’s the end of
it. The Sun’s cycle might influence machinery, but it’s not going to make much difference on
anything alive, right? If you think that, you’d be wrong. It’s not for nothing that the rest of
my horoscope mentioned poorer health. There’s growing evidence that the Sun’s cycles can even
influence ecosystems and species themselves – including humans.Some of this is incidental.
When the Schwabe cycle is at solar minimum, the Sun exerts less pressure through its solar winds,
which means ironically that we get less protection from our heliosphere from cosmic radiation.
This form of radiation is highly energetic, but fortunately rarely makes it through our atmosphere
for that very reason, as it’s likely to be absorbed or deflected by a passing air molecule.
But reaching the atmosphere is all that’s needed to produce an effect.
There is a theory – although still far from certain – that this extra radiation could
be creating nucleation sites in the atmosphere that seed extra clouds, influencing our weather.
Even if that’s not occurring, during solar maximum the space weather hitting our atmosphere can raise
global temperatures slightly. As my horoscope at the beginning predicted; a warming of the weather.
Not by much, it should be said – less than half a degree – and the temperature always eventually
returns to where it started; but it’s enough that it’s noticeable to species paying attention to
temperature… for instance, to decide when to start the mating season. Studies of birds have
shown that on warmer years they tend to lay eggs earlier. Curiously, a study published in 2009 by
researchers in the Netherlands went as far as to show that the laying times of blue tits were
also affected by the number of sunspots occurring, which even the researchers found hard to explain.
It’s not like birds can look at the Sun to see how many sunspots there are. Nevertheless,
a link seems to exist, according to the 5 nesting groups that were looked at.
This isn’t something that affects just blue tits, or even species like homing pigeons that
are sensitive to magnetic fluctuations - who fly different routes depending on what time in the
11-year cycle it is. I’m talking about the last unmentioned point in my horoscope: bad health.
There are numerous studies on how Solar cycles might influence us.
In 2011, a study spanning two decades of nearly one third of the women in Holland
discovered a peak in 6 cervical pathologies that took place just after solar maximum,
when the Sun’s radiation was hitting hardest. The same study also checked one man during the
same period, which admittedly is a much smaller number of candidates. Still, it was interesting
to note that the man experienced slight elevations in oral temperature, pulse rate,
blood pressure and respiration rate that took place soon after solar maximum too.
It's not just physical. There is even an influence on the rate of mental disorders. A study in 2006
looked at 237,000 clients in the Maine Medicaid database collected between 1995 and 2004. They
found that, of all those clients, those born during higher-energy chaotic cycles experienced
an increased rate in mental disorders. If this is the case, then the cycle of the Sun at the
moment of your birth might just have influenced the whole course of your life. It’s not quite
star signs, but astrology might just be on to something. At least with one specific star.
Ultimately, the science on this is still ongoing, and it should be stressed that any health impacts
caused by these cycles are extremely minor. As one researcher put it, it took hundreds and thousands
of patients to even notice that there was a health impact. The Sun’s cycles should not prevent you
from living your life. We’re currently heading towards a solar maximum, predicted to arrive
in 2025. But for those who are worried, living through or being born in a solar maximum isn’t all
bad. The same study suggested that this radiation might also lead to a rise in creativity and
adaptability. Perhaps it was during one such solar cycle, 80 thousand years ago, that a human brain
was first mutated to give it abstract thought and consciousness. If so, if they gave us the means to
perceive the universe, we have much to thank solar maximums for. We wouldn’t be us without them.
The Sun may have given you a mind to think abstractly with, but learning facts and skills
to fill that mind are sadly not just beamed down to us from above. Learning can take a lifetime.
Fortunately, there’s a free and easy way to learn and develop your knowledge of space,
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found in the course Astrophysics helps me get a better handle on our own star.
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