This story from Soren Dreier shares with us that our Sun’s magnetic field is now getting even closer to flipping, a polar shift. What will such a flip of the magnetic field on the sun mean for us here on Earth? A scientist from Stanford University explains in the first video below while the second video below from NASA explains this transformation further. Even the Wall Street Journal is now running a story called “Strange Doings On The Sun”.
The sun’s polarity is getting closer to flipping. The star’s northern hemisphere’s polarity has already reversed, and the southern hemisphere should follow suit soon, scientists say.
Every 11 years or so, the two hemispheres of the sun reverse their polarity, creating a ripple effect that can be felt throughout the far reaches of the solar system. The sun is currently going through one of those flips in its cycle, scientists working at Stanford University’s Wilcox Solar Observatory, which has monitored the sun’s magnetic field since 1975, said.
“The sun’s poles are reversing, and this is a large-scale process that takes place over a few months, but it happens once every 11 years,” Todd Hoeksema, a solar physicist at Stanford said in a video about the polarity reversal. “What we’re looking at is really a reversal of the whole heliosphere, everything from the sun out past the planets.”
“When that reverses it effects us here on Earth because not only do we see more cosmic rays, but there’s also more activity on the sun,” Hoeksema said. “That activity comes in and it affects the Earth’s magnetic field.”