The Sun now has two south poles! No need to worry i'm sure an Executive order is on it's way.

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The Sun now has two south poles! No need to worry i'm sure an Executive order is on it's way.HT: IceAgeNow.

Solar activity is stranger than in a century or more, say solar scientists, with the sun producing barely half the number of sunspots as expected and its magnetic poles oddly out of sync.

Normally, the sun’s magnetic north and south poles change polarity about every 11 years. During the reversal, the sun’s polar magnetic fields weaken, drop to zero, then re-emerge with the opposite polarity.

But in this cycle, the sun’s magnetic poles are out of sync. The sun’s north magnetic pole reversed polarity more than a year ago, giving it the same polarity as the south pole.

“The delay between the two reversals is unusually long,” said solar physicist Karel Schrijver at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, Calif.

The polar reversal takes place as the Sun’s magnetic field moves north or south from the equator, eroding the existing pole as it does, explains Todd Hoeksema, a scientist at Stanford University’s Wilcox Solar Observatory.

Phil Scherrer, who works with Mr Hoeksema, said: “The north pole has already changed sign, while the south pole is racing to catch up.

It looks like a complete field reversal could be “no more than three to four months away,” said Mr Hoeksema in early August.

The flip could send “ripple effects” throughout the solar system, causing geomagnetic storms, which, in turn, can cause radio blackouts and interfere with satellites.
Here’s the scoop

Here’s the scoop, says Dr. E. Kirsten Peters:
The sun has two big cycles of change. First, the number of sunspots – dark regions on the surface of the sun – wax and wane over time. That’s something you may have once learned in science class. But another cycle that’s less well known is that the magnetic poles of the sun swap places, north to south. Both of these changes occur on a cycle of about 11 years.
I recently talked about the sun to Dr. Michael Allen, a colleague of mine in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Washington State University. Allen explained to me that the sun’s magnetic field is in the process of decaying to zero. In the coming weeks it will reorganize itself with north and south poles fully reversed.
What was the north pole of the sun has actually already become a south pole. That means that at the moment the sun has two south poles.
That configuration “will likely change soon and the poles will be fully reversed,” says Allen.
The changes the sun is going through mean the sun is producing more cosmic rays. That translates into more impressive shows of the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis) which you may see lighting up portions of the night sky on clear nights.
Dr. E. Kirsten Peters was trained as a geologist at Princeton and Harvard. Her column is a service of the College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University.Hmmm.....Better stock up on those Winter Woolies

http://highlandstoday.com/list/highlands-agri-leader-news/suns-shifting-magnetic-poles-brings-more-cosmic-rays-20130925/

http://news.sky.com/story/1169107/sun-set-to-flip-upside-down-within-weeks


http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304672404579183940409194498