Astrum Space - What Will the Solar Maximum do to Earth in 2025?

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

Join with me today as we dive into Sun cycles. In particular, I intend to tell you exactly how the cycles of the Sun are already influencing the course of your life.

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 listening to the Astrum podcast. Today we're going to look at sun cycles. In particular, I am in a little bit of the asthmers. I'm Alex McColgan, and you're listening to the Astrum podcast.

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. 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. 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 degrees Celsius in its seven million degrees center, 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 kilometers across, form, drift, and vanish. Cronal mass ejections 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 realize 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 then back again. Sun spots, 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 hail cycle, which maps the changes in the Sun's magnetic polarity. Once every Schwabe cycle, every 11 years, the Sun's magnetic North Pole 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 exist within the Sun itself.

Yet, although we have observed these cycles in action for the last 200 years and have seen evidence of their influence on the Earth over the last 10,000, we're still no closer to figuring out why the Sun 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 civilization, 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 geomom

magnetic 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. A solar radiation can cause an expected 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, or be it 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. Additionally, about four times a year, need to expend fuel to correct their orbits, as there is still a tiny amount of atmosphere up there. But when a geomagnetic storm occurs, the atmosphere blossoms upwards, and low Earth orbit satellites

have to maneuver every two to three 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 in not the NASA's 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 Defense 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 your 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. 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 Chas' 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 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 poor a health. There's growing evidence that the Sun cycles can even influence ecosystems and species

themselves, including humans. Some of this is incidental. When the Schwabber cycle is at the 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. 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 temperature 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 research has 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 five 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. health. There are numerous studies on how solar cycles might influence this. In 2011, a study spanning two decades of nearly one-third of women in Holland discovered a peak in six cervical pathologies that took place just after solar maximum, when the sun's radiation was hitting hardest. The 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 2. It's not just physical. There's even an influence on the rate of mental disorders. A study in 2006 looked at 237,000 clients in the main Medicaid database collected between 1995 and 2004. They found that, of all those clients, those born during higher energy chaotic cycles,

experienced an increase 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 course of your life. It's not quite star signs, but astrology might just be onto 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 of thousands of patients to even notice that

there was a health impact. The sun cycle 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 lead to a rise in creativity and adaptability. it was during one such cycle 80,000 years ago that a human brain was 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. That's all we have time for today. I hope you've enjoyed listening to this podcast on the solar maximum. If you like what you've heard, please feel free to follow us for more podcasts on other fascinating things. space topics. But for now, I'm Alex McCulligan, and this has been Astrum. All the best, and see you next time.