The sun is about to flip its magnetic field
THE sun is about to flip its lid! Well, maybe not its lid but it is flipping its polarity.
On average, the sun goes through an 11-year cycle and at the peak of each cycle it changes its polarity.
A bit about the sun first. Imagine a ball of gas and it is spinning. The various gasses sit at different levels of the atmosphere and rotate at faster or slower speeds depending on their position as compared to the Equator.
Now, remember when you were a kid and you had one of the generators on your pushbike to power your headlight. It was able to generate electricity because of the rotation of a core of wire in between a magnet. The sun's core is like a giant bar magnet and when the gasses rotate at different speeds and heights, the core generates electricity.
Every 11 years, during the cycle's peak, the sun's magnetic polarity reverses itself. In other words, magnetic north and south on the sun flip. It is not known why this happens although scientists are continually studying the phenomenon.
What will happen to us when this happens? The short answer is nothing, nil, zilch! The Earth has an atmosphere that protects the human body from these solar waves or radiation. Even the astronauts on the International Space Station have been seen to weather these geomagnetic storms with little disruption and this is because the magnetic particles in the solar wind tend to push the more dangerous particles to the sides rather than drive them in front of the wind.
In northern and southern regions of the Earth people will see more Auroras and those who study the sun will see solar flares, CMEs (coronial mass ejections) and sunspots. These storms on the sun can cause a type of storm on the Earth known as a geomagnetic storm. And they have the potential to disrupt our modern lifestyle by affecting power grids, electrical equipment, radio waves and communications satellites.
An interesting advance in forecasting is coming from the UK with scientists there set to work in conjunction with Australian scientists to produce a daily solar weather forecast.
