Reversing Magnetic Poles Observed in Another Star 49
Babu 'God' Hoover tips us to news out of the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy that for the first time, a magnetic pole reversal has been observed in a star other than our own. Tau Bootis, while similar to the Sun, also has a planet more than six times larger than Jupiter orbiting at only a twentieth of the distance between Earth and the Sun. Scientists hope to use this discovery to learn more about the magnetic dynamics in the Sun, which can affect our telecommunications, among other things.
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Scientific research and progress is not nothing, but on the other hand, shut down enough fuel consumption by government mandate and see how little science is preformed. Maybe a better idea would be to take all the money the greens want to spend on stopping global warming and giving it instead as grants for University research - in all fields of science.
One major breakthrough could mute all the (possibly ill conceived) concerns with global warming (for just one example, think about the impact on finding hig
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Either:
a) Spend trillions, ruin our economy, and come up with solutions to a problem we don't know anything about, including whether it actually exists or what's causing it.
b) Spend a few million, help our long-term economy, and come up with useful science to help us make reasonable decisions and along the way come up with theories that may have us
nice false dichotomy (Score:2)
Either:
a) Spend trillions, ruin our economy, and come up with solutions to a problem we don't know anything about, including whether it actually exists or what's causing it.
b) Spend a few million, help our long-term economy, and come up with useful science to help us make reasonable decisions and along the way come up with theories that may have useful applications in other areas.
How do you know that fixing global warming now will ruin our economy? We are talking about reducing waste. That usually means being more efficient and doing more with less. Also, those trillions, who are they going to, and won't that help our economy? I think the economy will change, certainly, but will it die? That's more ludicrous than the silliest kind of global warming predictions
Most of the people whining about global warming in the it'll-kill-you-tomorrow camp seem to be politicians, the media, and scientists with expertise in what would happen *if* there is climate change (biologists, etc.), not scientists with expertise in what can cause climate change.
Where are you getting that info from? It seems you are just making things up to suit your argument. This is so typical of g
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http://f8d.org/?c=33 [f8d.org]
We havn't been a "little" species for a while now, you know.
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Why I'm sure we're not causing so much damage is because humans haven't been around all that long. The industrial revolution is only pretty recent, and back when we were just getting started as a species (thousands of years before the first factory or automobile was ever made), we were in the tail end of an ice age. Things have been warming up since then, without us having any reasonable way of causing it. I also know that where I live now in a nice temp
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That doesn't meet the requirements of Occam's Razor: "All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best." "it's probably Sol's fault" isn't a solution in that it doesn't explain climate change that we've been seeing. Take a look at solar output [wikipedia.org] over the last 30 years. Then take a look at temperature graphs [nasa.gov]. You cannot make the one explain the other, so you have to disregard it as a valid solution. Now look at a graph of carbon dioxide leve [cornell.edu]
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This isn't to say that it is indeed possible that there are other factors not related to our activity as causes of global warming. I am saying it seems that a lot of those who don't believe we have a significant effect on the planet tend to be the ones that don't want to either act in order to possibly mitigate
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Going on the assumption that man is causing climate change means we win either way, doing nothing in the hope that we're somehow wrong means that the very best possible outcome is that we're still completely dependant on fossil fuels in 50 or 100 ye
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I'm all for making life energy efficient, for not polluting our eco-systems, and for doing all we can to make life healthy. We should have been doing that all along. We may make our species extinct with gray goo before global warming has a chance, by the way.
My point was simply that mor
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On a tangent
Depends (Score:1)
Funny... (Score:2)
What? (Score:5, Informative)
Why would you bring up climate change? We've known for many years that the Sun flips its magnetic field every 11 years or so. This is simply the first time we've observed it in another star. The flipping of Sol's magnetic field causes a change in the number and size of sunspots which do affect solar output. This has been taken into account with climate models that show the earth is warming due to human influence. This news story offers absolutely no information pertinent to climate change.
Because we do not know some things does not mean we cannot know others. The fact that the theory of General Relativity does not work at atomic distances does not mean that we can't use it to determine clock skew in different gravity fields. GPS would not work without taking General Relativity into account if you want proof you can hold in your hand. Because we do not know everything about Quantum Mechanics does not mean that we cannot use the theory to create lasers, which are a direct result of quantum mechanical theory. You would not have CD and DVD drives if the theory wasn't mostly correct.
What you are basically saying is that we should throw up our hands and say that whether climate change is occurring due to human influence is unknowable. That sounds nothing like an 'INFORMED decision' as you put it. If you are truly interested, do some research yourself. I questioned man's influence on climate change also until I looked into it. Researchers who study the subject are almost completely of one mind, that humanity is influencing the climate and causing the world to be warmer that it has been in the past. These are people that spend their lives looking at all of the evidence, people that ask the questions you want the answers to and try their best to find them. The people that just throw their hands up and say that it is unknowable are the ones that deny global warming is happening. Some point to one of the warmest years on record being in the 1940s, but that is explainable due to normal cycles. Check out the trends [noaa.gov] though. Global warming is a FACT, that human influence is causing it is a theory with mountains of evidence supporting it and no evidence against it. The only other thing that people can point to as the cause for global warming is "something we don't know yet".
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I'm going to tak
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Tau Bootis (Score:5, Funny)
Nobody is going to relocate to an outpost in Tau Bootis. On the other hand, everyone would be clambering to go and live at the iPost in Apple Centauri.
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In most of the star catalogues the first field is a running number (ID). After the catalogue is published that ID number becomes yet another name for that star. Some stars have a hundred of these names.
Most stars are actually systems of multiple stars. Some catalogue numbers refer to the whole system. Some give each component a distinct ID. Some add a letter, a dot following a number, or dash, or something else.
Catalogues do have errors due wrong iden
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If we ever achieve intergalactic travel we're gonna be screwed if we try to give all of them even a unique obscure code.
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Damn, now I can't get that song out of my head, along with the image of 3-breasted green women jiggling everything.
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Nah they'll show. Just advertise as follows, with a time and date: Tau Bootis. Pole Dancing.
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Where the naming convention comes from. (Score:2)
The Sun had Bi-Polar disorder. (Score:1)
Re:The Sun had Bi-Polar disorder. (Score:4, Funny)
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How did they find out? (Score:3, Insightful)
How can we actually detect the magnetic field of another star?
I thought that the distance is certainly too big to observe it directly, and we barely have the resolution to tell that there is a planet there at all.
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This is not optimal, but is the unfortunate result of extremism within the anti-rational camp (including religious fundamentalists of all the major religions) that cause the other camp (rational scient
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I call bullshit. It's not scientists putting this crap out there. It's bad science reporting. If it's not a scary disease or a global disaster, then it gets about 3 words (not in a row) of actual scientific content, surrounded by fuzzy blather and bad analogies. (If it is a scary disease or a global disaster, then it gets 6 scientifically meaningful words, 4 of them wrong.)
Re:How did they find out? (Score:4, Informative)
There is a mention of " ESPaDOnS, the new generation stellar spectropolarimeter" as being the instrument involved. Link here http://www.ast.obs-mip.fr/projets/espadons/espadons.html [obs-mip.fr]
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I don't know about stars, but for our sun, we determine magnetic polarity by studying the polarization of the light coming from it. Magnetic fields can polarize light.
History precedence and the reality 2012 (Score:1)
I think finding evidence of these cycles in other parts of the galaxy may give us clues as to what to expect and that the cycles are not limited to our own solar system.
It has been my position that what we see happening is the result of an increase in energy absorbed by the earth system. The source(s) of th
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Not very surprising. (Score:3, Interesting)
By not fully predicable I refer to that the flows that occurs are similar to the weather we experience here on Earth. The weather can be predicted with an acceptable accuracy over a week, but longer than that is hard. However the timeframe for magnetic fields are different, so they are predictable over a longer period of time.
Anyway - this means that the flows inside a star can change pattern, or that the electrical currents induced can change (not always the same thing) and they in turn will cause the magnetic field to change. Changes involves flares, sunspots and magnetic field disturbances - even as far as changing the polarity. So if our sun does that it's not surprising that another star with similar properties also exhibits the same behavior.
More interesting stellar objects to study would be red stars like the Betelgeuze star or giant blue stars like Rigel. Since they are much larger they can offer different results. Same goes for white dwarfs. Some stars are very strong in their radiation and can provide a great deal of information from a distance, but not everything. There may still be surprises waiting for us!
There may be a poles shift on earth in 2012 (Score:2)
Nobody reads the safety instructions (Score:1)
Cross.
The.
Streams.
It would be bad.
Poll change (Nov 2008) (Score:2)