The Sun Is Lopsided

[SDJ]

That was a rhetorical question.

[SDJ]

Typical reaction of the pseudo-scientist. You're not worth arguing with because all you will do is react as you have above.

Stick to astrology why don't you.

You bring so much to the discussion.

My simple proposition was that solar activity over time is distributed unevenly around the sphere. I found a reliable historical dataset and started looking into the question. I provided the source of the data and showed some examples of initial findings that I feel would warrant a further look.

Your proposition would be, I assume, that activity is uniformly distributed around the sphere. You are welcome to provide data to support that view.

Or you can just call people names and impugn their intelligence. That seems to be becoming a popular version of "science" of late.

[norpag]

SDJ You will find your observations fit very well with the ideas of Mozina - go to thesurfaceofthesun.com
I think your approach is just the sort of thing which leads to new ideas and discoveries. Some of the images on the Mozina site are highly intriguing - not to say persuasive. Regards Norman Page.

[SDJ]

Norman,

Thanks for joining in!

I'm aware of the iron core and the electrical models, but I'm still an old-fashioned gas guy. I do suspect, though, that the pressures at the core may produce a gaseous state that begins to resemble that of a liquid, and thus allow phenomena to occur that move in rotation at a much slower relative rate, sort of like my "bubble in a stream" analogy earlier.

That would explain what I'm seeing in going through the SRS sunspot data, unevenness in the distribution of the surface activity we can see due to unevenness in the core reaction.

There are Fe nuclei that have been detected in the ejecta of major events, but I suspect they're the product of multiple fusion reactions building heavier nuclei from lighter ones in the course of several "trips" to the core resulting from convection currents.

I'll check into the link you posted, and I do appreciate you not calling me names .

[scpg02]

Mar 9, 2010 17:26:01 GMT norpag said:

SDJ You will find your observations fit very well with the ideas of Mozina - go to thesurfaceofthesun.com
I think your approach is just the sort of thing which leads to new ideas and discoveries. Some of the images on the Mozina site are highly intriguing - not to say persuasive. Regards Norman Page.

Have either of you looked at Dr. Oliver Manuel's work? There is a link at that sureface site you linked. He can be very convincing when you talk to him. I have friends in NASA of course who totally discount his work.

[norpag]

I had an e-mail exchnge with Oliver a year or so ago. One obvious insuperable difficulty with his idea is that if there is a neutron star and iron core at the sun's center it becomes impossible to build a solar model with its 1.4 density. He could never answer when asked to explain this objection.
He and Mozina published a joint paper which is linked at the Mozina site.
Mozina's ideas, though way out ,are much more plausible , and thought provoking - the temperature in sunspots is .at least in the same orderof magnitude ,as the melting point of iron.

[scpg02]

Mar 10, 2010 0:41:29 GMT norpag said:

One obvious insuperable difficulty with his idea is that if there is a neutron star and iron core at the sun's center it becomes impossible to build a solar model with its 1.4 density. He could never answer when asked to explain this objection.

Well he does have a lifetime of work invested in this idea. He will probably die with it.

[SDJ]

science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2010/12mar_conveyorbelt.htm?list1284404

[SDJ]

If anyone is interested, I've finished collating the data files from here:

fenyi.solarobs.unideb.hu/DPD/index.html

They total 464,403 observation records for individual sunspots covering the periods 1986-2003 and 2007-2009. Their work on 2004-2006 is "in progress" and should become available at some time in the future. The available records at present do cover the years starting midway through the ramp-up and peak in Cycle 22 on to the beginning of Cycle 23 and past its peak as well as the first 2 years of Cycle 24.

The individual records include the following data:

Date and Time of Observation
NOAA Active Region Number
Assigned No. of Each Individual Sunspot in Each NOAA AR
Projected Umbra Area in millionths of the Solar Disk
Projected Umbra + Penumbra Area "
Corrected Umbra Area "
Corrected Umbra + Penumbra Area "
Latitude of the Individual Sunspot
Carrington Longitude of the Individual Sunspot
Three other variables about observation conditions

From their explanation, the "corrected" areas take into account areas shared by more than one sunspot, i.e., the umbra or penumbra of one spot bleeding into adjacent spot(s).

I've zipped the 21 yearly Excel files into three groups ranging from 6 MB to almost 9 MB in size. If you're interested, please leave a private message or email me at my listed address and I'll get started sending them out. If those file sizes would explode your email account, I can group them into smaller bundles if necessary.

As Excel files, they allow sorting by choice of variables as well as plotting functions. I've only done some initial examinations, but they show some interesting patterns.

[lsvalgaard]

Mar 25, 2010 17:44:35 GMT SDJ said:

If anyone is interested, I've finished collating the data files from here:

fenyi.solarobs.unideb.hu/DPD/index.html

They total 464,403 observation records for individual sunspots covering the periods 1986-2003 and 2007-2009. Their work on 2004-2006 is "in progress" and should become available at some time in the future. The available records at present do cover the years starting midway through the ramp-up and peak in Cycle 22 on to the beginning of Cycle 23 and past its peak as well as the first 2 years of Cycle 24.

The individual records include the following data:

Date and Time of Observation
NOAA Active Region Number
Assigned No. of Each Individual Sunspot in Each NOAA AR
Projected Umbra Area in millionths of the Solar Disk
Projected Umbra + Penumbra Area "
Corrected Umbra Area "
Corrected Umbra + Penumbra Area "
Latitude of the Individual Sunspot
Carrington Longitude of the Individual Sunspot
Three other variables about observation conditions

From their explanation, the "corrected" areas take into account areas shared by more than one sunspot, i.e., the umbra or penumbra of one spot bleeding into adjacent spot(s).

I've zipped the 21 yearly Excel files into three groups ranging from 6 MB to almost 9 MB in size. If you're interested, please leave a private message or email me at my listed address and I'll get started sending them out. If those file sizes would explode your email account, I can group them into smaller bundles if necessary.

As Excel files, they allow sorting by choice of variables as well as plotting functions. I've only done some initial examinations, but they show some interesting patterns.

You have looked at this. Do you know why their projected [measured] areas are larger than their corrected areas? I would assume that foreshortening would make the measured areas smaller, not larger...

[SDJ]

This is the explanation they give at the website:

Proj. U - Projected umbra area in millionths of solar disc, negative values indicate that the umbra consists of fragmented regions which cannot be separated without losing umbral area. In this way several spots (intensity minima in the umbra) have a common umbra, e.g. -2 means that the given spot shares an umbra with spot No.2, and the common U value is indicated at spot No.2.

The other three data columns have to do with distance from the center of the hemisphere, distance from the Carrington median line and the angle of the observation, which would naturally affect the umbra and penumbra size estimates, but large spots persist over a longer period and the estimates could be expected to be more accurate when the direction of observation is straight at a spot.

I haven't gotten further into that yet.

[lsvalgaard]

Mar 25, 2010 20:35:25 GMT SDJ said:

This is the explanation they give at the website:

Proj. U - Projected umbra area in millionths of solar disc, negative values indicate that the umbra consists of fragmented regions which cannot be separated without losing umbral area. In this way several spots (intensity minima in the umbra) have a common umbra, e.g. -2 means that the given spot shares an umbra with spot No.2, and the common U value is indicated at spot No.2.

The other three data columns have to do with distance from the center of the hemisphere, distance from the Carrington median line and the angle of the observation, which would naturally affect the umbra and penumbra size estimates, but large spots persist over a longer period and the estimates could be expected to be more accurate when the direction of observation is straight at a spot.

I haven't gotten further into that yet.

I think in their tables they just have the projected and the corrected columns switched around. Here is a day:
d 1986 07 30 12 36 54 GYUL 70 379 47 255
The 70 379 are claimed to be projected
The 47 255 are claimed to be corrected.

A few times it looks OK though:
d 1988 02 24 10 38 52 DEBR 60 387 91 584

Strange...

[SDJ]

The files seem to be fairly consistent, with the P > C. I think the way they've explained it, part of the P of a particular spot may be stripped away with the correction and assigned to a different spot, so the total areas are reduced in the process of correction as they may have been "double-counted" in the beginning.

[lsvalgaard]

Mar 25, 2010 21:14:25 GMT SDJ said:

The files seem to be fairly consistent, with the P > C. I think the way they've explained it, part of the P of a particular spot may be stripped away with the correction and assigned to a different spot, so the total areas are reduced in the process of correction as they may have been "double-counted" in the beginning.

No, that would not explain why P > C for the whole day for days where there are only one group on the disk, like these days:
d 2009 05 16 11 08 34 GYUL 0 23 0 13
d 2009 11 06 07 46 18 GYUL 2 16 1 8

[SDJ]

Here's a good look at how the counting was done for AR 9169, the largest of Cycle 23:



Their criteria for counting the spots seem to be different, too. AR 9169 was classified as having 119 spots by the SRS and 260 spots by Debrecen.