ASTR 100Lgx Lecture Notes - Lecture 25: Maunder Minimum, Little Ice Age, Aurora
Document Summary
Temperatures dropped, rivers froze, made a little ice age. Suggests a link between solar activity and earth"s climate. More rapid climate changes is probably not from the sun. There was a younger dryas temperature drop 11,000 years ago. Produce radioisotopes that are captured by living things and ice! The magnetic field of the sun switches back and forth in a 22 year period. From 1645 to 1715 there were few sunspots, called the maunder minimum. Galactic cosmic rays are high speed nuclei from outside the solar system. There"s a general historic link between sunspots and climate, but we haven"t been measuring for long enough to be sure. On a short time span, the sun undergoes flares and coronal mass ejections (cmes) In 1800s helmholtz and kelvin thought the sun"s energy came from slowly shrinking. Einstein"s idea of mass and energy being the same thing changed how we think of it.
