Weak Solar Convection 100 Times Slower Than Predicted 95
An anonymous reader writes about an observation that convection in the outer layer of the Sun seems not to behave how it ought to: "These new findings based on SDO imagery, if verified, would upend our understanding of how heat is transported outwards by the Sun and challenges existing explanations of the formation of sunspots, the magnetic field generation of the sun, not to mention the concept of convective mixing of light and heavy elements in the solar atmosphere. 'However, our results (PDF) suggest that convective motions in the Sun are nearly 100 times smaller than these current theoretical expectations,' continued Hanasoge, also a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Plank Institute in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany. 'These motions are indeed that slow in the Sun, then the most widely accepted theory concerning the generation of solar magnetic field is broken, leaving us with no compelling theory to explain its generation of magnetic fields and the need to overhaul our understanding of the physics of the Sun's interior.'"
Electric Sun? (Score:3, Interesting)
Forgive me for asking a basic question, if it is one. Assuming these observations are indeed correct, does this make any part of the idea of an electric sun more plausible than the current model of the sun? If string theory seems more like physics than magic, then why is even the direction of the idea toward an electric sun absurd?
How does this affect age estimates for the Sun (Score:3, Interesting)
What I would like to know is how this change in measured convection rate affects our models of solar lifecycles. Granted, this may be a methodology error; IANAP (anymore), so I can't answer that question, but it seems to me some important new questions arise as a result of this finding. Does this mean stars age slower than we thought, or faster - or is the rate unchanged? Is the overall heat transfer is slower, is some other known mechanism transferring more heat, or is there some unknown transfer mechanism we have yet to discover? There's a lot of work for some lucky grad students out there.
Electric Universe crackpots (Score:3, Interesting)
The Electric Universe crackpots have always claimed [thunderbolts.info] that convection had nothing to do with it. [thunderbolts.info]
I've been fascinated with the thunderbolts.info site for quite a while. They haven't yet convinced me that we need to throw out our conventional understanding of the universe, but they have some extremely fascinating theories, and I'm disappointed that I haven't seen any serious responses to their theories.