Time Immortal

Apparently, the last year that had a higher count of days in which no sunspot activity was observed on the face of the Sun was way back in 1954. And if less than 50 days between now and the end of the year demonstrate any indication of sunspot activity, 2008 will replace ‘54 as the third-place champion for spotlessness in the last century.

From NASA yesterday:

Sept. 30, 2008: Astronomers who count sunspots have announced that 2008 is now the “blankest year” of the Space Age.

As of Sept. 27, 2008, the sun had been blank, i.e., had no visible sunspots, on 200 days of the year. To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go back to 1954, three years before the launch of Sputnik, when the sun was blank 241 times.

“Sunspot counts are at a 50-year low,” says solar physicist David Hathaway of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. “We’re experiencing a deep minimum of the solar cycle.”

And why the blankety-blank does this matter? From Planet Gore in May:

Sunspots are magnetic storms on the sun’s surface that are used as a proxy measure for the Sun’s interplanetary magnetic field. As Henrik Svensmark and Fred Singer argue, the Sun’s magnetic field effects cloud formation in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. The more magnetically active the Sun is, the fewer cosmic rays reach our upper atmosphere. When cosmic rays do reach the Earth, they react with atmospheric gases to free nuclei that help seed cloud formation, cooling the Earth’s surface.

No sunspots = more clouds = lower temperatures.

Coincidentally, the Earth’s average temperature has been dropping since at least January of this year.

Or perhaps…not so coincidentally.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!