What's going on with the sun?
First off let's remember that the Bible speaks frequently of the sun playing into the signs of the Last Days.
Secondly, let's remember that if the sun happens to shoot out a massive burst of gamma rays and they smack directly into planet earth....our electric grid could be fried in the twinkling of an eye. For Western Civilization....no electricity for weeks or months would be catastrophic...to say the least. (Google CARRINGTON EVENT)
How could we watch Entertainment Tonight without TV'S? How would my Hot Pocket get heated for dinner? How would I know what my friends are doing if I can't see FaceBook? How would my cell phone get charged?? How would my turkey get carved without an electric carving knife?
Something is up with the sun.
Scientists say that solar activity is stranger than in a century or more, with the sun producing barely half the number of sunspots as expected and its magnetic poles oddly out of sync.
The sun generates immense magnetic fields as it spins. Sunspots—often broader in diameter than Earth—mark areas of intense magnetic force that brew disruptive solar storms. These storms may abruptly lash their charged particles across millions of miles of space toward Earth, where they can short-circuit satellites, smother cellular signals or damage electrical systems.
Based on historical records, astronomers say the sun this fall ought to be nearing the explosive climax of its approximate 11-year cycle of activity—the so-called solar maximum. But this peak is "a total punk," said Jonathan Cirtain, who works at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as project scientist for the Japanese satellite Hinode, which maps solar magnetic fields.
"I would say it is the weakest in 200 years," said David Hathaway, head of the solar physics group at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
Researchers are puzzled. They can't tell if the lull is temporary or the onset of a decades-long decline, which might ease global warming a bit by altering the sun's brightness or the wavelengths of its light.
"There is no scientist alive who has seen a solar cycle as weak as this one," said Andrés Munoz-Jaramillo, who studies the solar-magnetic cycle at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
To complicate the riddle, the sun also is undergoing one of its oddest magnetic reversals on record.
Normally, the sun's magnetic north and south poles change polarity every 11 years or so. During a magnetic-field reversal, the sun's polar magnetic fields weaken, drop to zero, and then emerge again with the opposite polarity. As far as scientists know, the magnetic shift is notable only because it signals the peak of the solar maximum, said Douglas Biesecker at NASA's Space Environment Center.
But in this cycle, the sun's magnetic poles are out of sync, solar scientists said. The sun's north magnetic pole reversed polarity more than a year ago, so it has the same polarity as the south pole.
I'm guessing the liberals will soon blame the sun's strange behavior on GLOBAL WARMING. But of course this is a problem....being the sun is 93,000,000 miles away...and is totally unaffected by farting cows, wood stoves and coal plants.
Take comfort in the fact that God made the sun. He knows every spin, magnetic pole shift and sun spot that ever was or will ever be on this massive ball of gas. He holds the entire universe in his grasp...and yet tells us that not one sparrow falls from the sky without His knowledge.
How awesome is that???
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