How do sunspots affect earth

It is difficult to disentangle the many factors that contribute to climate change. For instance, how do you separate the effects of global warming from the possible effects incurred by changes in solar activity? Dearborn is also cautious about ascribing climate effects to sunspot cycles: "People have speculated, but I don't think the connection is absolute yet As far as we can currently tell, variations in the sunspot cycle seem to have far less impact on the earth's climate than human actions, such as burning fossil fuels or clear-cutting forests, do.

However, more research into sunspots needs to done. But during periods of intense sunspot activity, which coincide with solar flares and coronal mass ejections, the geomagnetic flow from the sun is much stronger.

These magnetic storms produce heightened, spectacular displays of the Aurora Borealis and the Aurora Australis, otherwise known as the Northern and Southern Lights. As Fisher describes it, "The earth has a protective cocoon of magnetic field called the magnetosphere, and it normally protects us from the magnetic particles of the solar wind, and the other energetic particles in the solar wind. But during a coronal mass ejection we actually have a chunk of the sun that breaks away and hits the earth's magnetosphere, and disturbs it, and this disturbance shows up as aurorae.

Observatory The Exploratorium. The photosphere is about km deep, and provides most of our solar radiation. The layer is about 6, degrees Kelvin at the inner boundary and 4, K on the outside. The temperature within sunspots is about 4, K. The number of sunspots peaks every There is a strong radial magnetic field within a sunspot, as implied in the picture , and the direction of the field reverses in alternate years within the leading sunspots of a group.

So the true sunspot cycle is There is also a superimposed fluctuation with a period of 25 months, i. Sunspots were observed in the Far East for over years, but examined more intensely in Europe after the invention of telescopes in the 17th century. In Johannes Hevelius in Danzig made drawings of the movements of sunspots eastwards and gradually towards the solar equator. In William Herschel attempted to correlate the annual number of sunspots to the price of grain in London.

The year cycle of the number of sunspots was first demonstrated by Heinrich Schwabe in There have been several periods during which sunspots were rare or absent, most notably the Maunder minimum , and less markedly the Dalton minimum Fig 2. By means of the premise of excess 14 C concentrations in independently dated material such as tree rings , other minima have been found at times prior to direct sunspot observations, for instance the Sporer minimum from to Data from 8, year-old bristle-cone pine trees indicate 18 periods of sunspot minima in the last 7, years 1.

This and other studies have shown that the Sun as well as other stars spends about a quarter of its time with very few sunspots. There is another well-known, super-imposed variation of annual sunspot numbers, of about 85 years. This irregular variation affects the length of the sunspot cycle, ranging from 9.