[KayEyeDoubleDee]

There's also a video at the BBC webpage, but the flash player doesn't allow me to deep link to it.

[Trailerpark Badass]

uh-oh...

[April Lexington]

This is ALL George Bush’s fault...

[2001convSVT]

Earth cooling here we come!

[GQuagmire]

[Myrddin]

The sun refuses to follow Al Gore's global warming agenda. Lack of sunspots portends an ice age. Gore will not be pleased. The rest of us may freeze and starve as a consequence of not paying attention to the actual physical phenomena instead of the agenda driven hoax.

[Zeppelin]

Jessica Simpson is right...Proactiv works!

[GQuagmire]

Looks like the sun used some Proactiv and cleared up its complexion :)

[Liberty1970]

Calm before the storm?

[freedumb2003]

Human-caused Global Warming finally affects the Sun, just like al gore said it would!

[cripplecreek]

She’s gonna blow!!!!!!!!

[shibumi]

It’s just sitting there, thinking about whether to incinerate us now ... or later.

(Animistic Universe anyone?)

[USCG SimTech]

Just resting for the big one like back in the late 1800’s. Only this time there's the whole world's electronics to fry, not just teletype operators to nearly electrocute.

[kempo]

And here we are going to all the trouble of trying to stop global warming and the sun is going to do it for us. Al Gore has to be disappointed.

[waxer1]

Does the alignment in 2012 have anything to do with this?

[dragnet2]

Bookmark

[Oldeconomybuyer]

Obama Executive Order #2009-666.

[colinhester]

Back in high school I used to observe the sun everey day just to see the spots and track them. With a small refractor (properly filtered of course!) I could easily see dozens of very large spots. It’s hard to imagine the sun now blemish free....C

[sniper63]

Let’s send Al “Baby” Gore and the new environmental Czar on a space cruise to find and fix the problem with the sun. Obviously it’s a racist thing now that the dark spots on the sun are gone.

[Old Retired Army Guy]

Oh my God! We’re all going to freeze to death.

[ETL]

Solar/sunspot Cycle 24, which began in Jan 2008, is especially slow to get going with activity. In fact, 2008 had the most sunspot-free days of any year in the past 50.

______________________________________

From NASA.gov, September 30, 2008:

Coinciding with the string of blank suns is a 50-year record low in solar wind pressure, a recent discovery of the Ulysses spacecraft. (See the Science@NASA story Solar Wind Loses Pressure.) The pressure drop began years before the current minimum, so it is unclear how the two phenomena are connected, if at all. This is another mystery for SDO and the others.

...

"There is also the matter of solar irradiance," adds Pesnell. "Researchers are now seeing the dimmest sun in their records. The change is small, just a fraction of a percent, but significant. Questions about effects on climate are natural if the sun continues to dim."

Article:
Spotless Sun: Blankest Year of the Space Age [50 years]

______________________________________________________

Astronomers who count sunspots have announced that 2008 is now the "blankest year" of the Space Age

As of Sept. 27, 2008, the sun had been blank, i.e., had no visible sunspots, on 200 days of the year. To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go back to 1954, three years before the launch of Sputnik, when the sun was blank 241 times.

"Sunspot counts are at a 50-year low," says solar physicist David Hathaway of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. "We're experiencing a deep minimum of the solar cycle."

And it is a very quiet time. If solar activity continues as low as it has been, 2008 could rack up a whopping 290 spotless days by the end of December, making it a century-level year in terms of spotlessness.

Hathaway cautions that this development may sound more exciting than it actually is: "While the solar minimum of 2008 is shaping up to be the deepest of the Space Age, it is still unremarkable compared to the long and deep solar minima of the late 19th and early 20th centuries." Those earlier minima routinely racked up 200 to 300 spotless days per year.

Some solar physicists are welcoming the lull.

"This gives us a chance to study the sun without the complications of sunspots," says Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center. "Right now we have the best instrumentation in history looking at the sun. There is a whole fleet of spacecraft devoted to solar physics--SOHO, Hinode, ACE, STEREO and others. We're bound to learn new things during this long solar minimum."

As an example he offers helioseismology: "By monitoring the sun's vibrating surface, helioseismologists can probe the stellar interior in much the same way geologists use earthquakes to probe inside Earth. With sunspots out of the way, we gain a better view of the sun's subsurface winds and inner magnetic dynamo."

"There is also the matter of solar irradiance," adds Pesnell. "Researchers are now seeing the dimmest sun in their records. The change is small, just a fraction of a percent, but significant. Questions about effects on climate are natural if the sun continues to dim."

Pesnell is NASA's project scientist for the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a new spacecraft equipped to study both solar irradiance and helioseismic waves. Construction of SDO is complete, he says, and it has passed pre-launch vibration and thermal testing. "We are ready to launch! Solar minimum is a great time to go."

Coinciding with the string of blank suns is a 50-year record low in solar wind pressure, a recent discovery of the Ulysses spacecraft. (See the Science@NASA story Solar Wind Loses Pressure.) The pressure drop began years before the current minimum, so it is unclear how the two phenomena are connected, if at all. This is another mystery for SDO and the others.

Who knew the blank sun could be so interesting?

More to come...

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/30sep_blankyear.htm

Related article:
Solar Wind Loses Power, Hits 50-year Low - Sept. 23, 2008
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/23sep_solarwind.htm