By The Way...

Friday, March 23, 2007
10:30:00 AM EDT
Hearing Someone Nice Like you -- Sammy Davis, Jr.


Good morning! I have two stellar links for you today. No, it's not that they're good (though they are), it's that they're concerning stars. Real ones. Like, out there in space. Stop thinking about Britney Spears. She's out of rehab now. No one can help her anymore.

First link: This nifty NASA story tells us that right now, we're at the solar minimum. This doesn't this is the time the sun feels the least good about itself ("shucks, I'm only a G2 star, when I could have been a G0!" -- that's a little astronomy humor for you there), but the point at which sunspot activity is at its least. This also means very little in the way of things like Northern Lights. But -- they expect the next sunspot cycle will be huge, perhaps even as big as the historic Solar Max of 1958! You remember that, right? Kept interfering with your viewing of Bonanza. Bad news: this sunspot cycle won't peak until 2012. Coincidentally, 2012 is also the year the Mayan calendar runs out -- we'll be all out of baktuns! -- so the thought of the end of the Mayan calendar and massive solar storms brought on my sunspots gives me the feeling that 2012 will be all about the Apocalypse. Start building the anti-zombie shelter now!

Yes, I'm a little caffeinated.

Let's see if I can get through this second link a little less babbly:

Holy cow! Scientists explode a whole star! They'd been saving up their firecrackers, see, for years, and then one day they saw they had this huge pile of firecrackers, and they thought "what are we going to do with all these?" And then just at that moment a star wandered into the yard. And the scientists, see, they'd been drinking their beer all afternoon. In retrospect, it was inevitable.

No, that's not really happened. It was just a computer simulation. But my story is better.

I don't think I got through that one any less babbly, did I?


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This entry has 3 comments: (Add your own)

• #3 Comment from lurkynat 
  3/26/07 3:16 PM | Permalink

  Dear John,
  (ducking for shelter)... uh.... more sun? some palces are just fine wiht that but we have our extreme hot places as well! eckkkkk!
  hugs,nat
• #2 Comment from princesssaurora 
  3/25/07 1:36 AM | Permalink

  You are too funny... so are the sun's parents still hoping it will achieve G0 with a wistful... 'Someday'....
  
  be well,
  Dawn
  http://journals.aol.com/princesssaurora/CarpeDiem/
• #1 Comment from anaedream 
  3/23/07 11:47 AM | Permalink

  Here's my sunny contribution to the thread.
  
  http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.rss.html?pid=22175
  
  It's an article on the Hinode, the Japanese (but funded by American (organized by NASA) and British institutes while actually being  operated by  Norwegians on their particular parcel of soil) solar observatory.
  
  It's got some great videos and jpgs, so soak up that sun, because if the world is gonna end in 2012, I was off by only 3 years in my previous predictions that our planet would be blown to bits by a supernova.
  
  *Gets a tan*