Time told by the Sun

Did Edward and Annie Maunder read Mallarmé’s poem when they took it upon themselves to tell the story of the heavens? Did they take note of the way his writing dances on the sheets of paper and how each word and group of words spread like sunspots on the Sun’s surface? Observers held down by gravity to the Earth’s crust see the reality, that is there for them to see, on the uppermost layer of things: stars twinkling on the velvet sky, sunspot groups whose ascent to the surface remains invisible. 

They see patterns, signs of a hidden process, and clues that storms are brewing. They observe outbreaks of spots beginning in the regions farthest in latitude and migrating in both hemispheres closer to the Sun’s equator. The distribution zone of those outbreaks within a solar cycle draws a butterfly-like time stamp. They notice the fluctuations in the symmetry of the wings. During the grand solar maximum of the last century, there was a clear north-south asymmetry, with a significantly greater number of outbreaks in the northern hemisphere. The trend was reversed with sunspots almost exclusively in the southern hemisphere during the last grand minimum and the Maunder minimum (1645–1710).

Sunspots live and die, at least on the surface. Quieter areas, between stronger magnetic clusters, act as transition regions as if they were linked to a network down below. Darker-looking spots are large and small, growing and shrinking,  breaking up and coalescing, round and elongated, short and long-lived, in pairs and in groups. There are dark clouds with haloes passing in the plasma sky. And just as clouds, they change form and disappear.

I thought about writing a post on how the Sun remains a constant in our lives. From the Eagle Nebula, I came back to the timeless presence of the Sun. Born from nebula clouds and contracted into a ball of gas, his internal dynamics transpire through spots, plages, pores, jet-like prominences, and rising flares. Below the surface, his granular texture hides a mechanism that secretly triggers sudden conflagrations as if underground volcanoes were spewing excess plasma. Pressure waves up and down along tunnels and bridges create a changing morphology.

But in the end, I wrote about cycles of time, how apparent cycles stretch, break under the heavy weight of internal and external drivers and disruptors. Intervals in between lengthen. Cycles are lost amid variables. They are an approximation of reality that involves a bundle of coarse-grained events whose fine details start to take shape. Any system — whether it be the Sun or the Universe — evolves into a more random state as time progresses.

And so, the Sun goes through cycles of change. Cyclicity is a property easier to comprehend on shorter time scales, less when it comes to a time span of thousands to billions of years whose beginning and end are hard to fathom. Chance, through the appearance of repeating patterns, like sunspots, rises to the surface. In the Sun’s polar field reversal and magnetic activity, we find indicators and set up parameters to confirm predictions of a cyclic, if not periodic, pattern. While solar cycles last, on average, for 11 years, a cycle around 1601 lasted five years, and the one that followed, 16. In the 18th century, there were 7 or 8 years cycles while others lasted for 15. The hypothesis is that the lengthening of plural neighboring solar cycles, among which at least one cycle is several years longer than 11, could be a prerequisite for long-lasting sunspot disappearance. Yet, while cycle 23 was 12.7 years, 24 returned to a regular length of 11 years.

Solar minima, which last a few cycles, are also characterized by a greater number of spotless days. Cycle 24 was the 4th on record with the least sunspots. There were  274 spotless days in 2019 (SILSO). However, a recent increase in solar activity has occurred during the rising phase of solar cycle 25. It has seen a reversal, with the number of spotless days dropping in 2020 and 2021, respectively 192 and 50 (SILSO). After a quiet solar winter, the Sun came out of his slumber to resume his fiery activity.

Whether we are coming out of a brief minimum period will be determined by whether 25 is as weak as or weaker than 24. Its maximum is expected between February and March 2024, and if there is a secular minimum, it may last through cycle 26. But even so, it would not be sufficient to counteract the warming trend caused by greenhouse gas emissions, which is six times greater than the possible decades-long cooling from a prolonged grand solar minimum. 

Twelve hundred years ago, a large sunspot was observed with the naked eye on March 16, 807, at the time of Charlemagne. As it was reported in the Annales Royales, it lasted eight days. Was it of the size or even exceeding that of the great north group of solar spots spotted by Richard Carrington in 1859? During the great geomagnetic storm of August 28 through September 3, 1859, Carrington witnessed the extremely powerful sequence of two patches of intensely bright and white light, stronger possibly than the most powerful X-ray flare recorded on the 4th of November 2003. Large flares may impact Earth directly depending on where eruptions occur on the Sun’s surface. Magnetic reconnection, in which energy stored in magnetic fields is converted to energy in charged particles, is at the base of the formation of geomagnetic storms, potentially damaging to satellites, space travel, ground communication systems, and power grids. Charlemagne’s biography described the fire of a wooden structure and a dazzling torch descending from the serene sky. Do those details relate to a coronal mass ejection reaching Earth? It is estimated that G dwarf stars like the Sun could produce superflares every few hundred to few thousand years. 

In the mind’s eye, everything is connected through loops of adjustment and feedback, from cosmic events to the growth of tree rings. We feel the timeless presence of what is, what has passed, what will be, and what is always becoming. Tree ring researchers attempt to confirm whether radiocarbon enrichment events of cosmogenic origin can leave consistent fingerprints. One study discovered a possible correlation with three potential solar particle events in 994, 1052, and 1279. Another identified two radiocarbon events in 774 and 993. A third suggested that the solar system navigates through interstellar clouds thick enough to shrink by a factor of one-fourth the heliospheric magnetic field, already diminished after the past few weak cycles. When solar activity declines, galactic cosmic rays may reach Earth and cause a rapid increase in carbon-14 at every other minima of solar cycles.

While we contemplate the possibility of longer cycles of an astronomical origin, we ask ultimately to what extent they are intertwined with those of the whole biosphere and human life.  We understand time through the spatiotemporal complexities of interlocked cycles (sunspots, precession, rotation, seasonal, hydrological, carbon, nitrogen,…). Yet, we still struggle to grasp how the relationship between living souls and the Universe fits in all of this. 

Within a system of stacked cycles, there appears hidden in the human brain and body the hard question of consciousness. We can’t confirm the system-wide cyclicality of historically rare events, only that there, on Earth in this Universe, are born living souls. Concretely, on the surface, the Universe reveals itself step by step and knows itself little by little. Below the surface, there are intricate connections between beings and mechanisms, all equipped with the power of agency. We feel that the birth of a human soul is a fractal occurrence like the branches of an invisible tree and that, beyond the Earth’s geophysical and biochemical response to solar activity, there are resonance signals overshadowed along the paths of UV flux, energetic particles, and plasmatic matter. Let’s imagine that the Sun has volition and the power to communicate through light particles. And so the noise-like character of the solar radiation and the sound of waves on his stormy surface are received loud and clear at radio frequencies over great distances in neighboring galaxies to the other side of the Universe. But even the Sun is subject to universal time structures.

In January 2023, the Earth shook significantly on 12 occasions, with two events on January 20th — and again this month with a magnitude 7.8 earthquake in Turkey — while two dozen volcanoes threw thermal signals, emitted ash, and blew steam. The Sun, too, put out a clear message that it was quiet no more with three X-flares (small though) and 13 medium-sized bursts. When dealing with concomitant events, we wonder whether the Earth trembles when the Sun unleashes dust clouds, whether she responds with tears of lava when solar winds unwind.

In the end, the Universe is a metaphor meant to describe shapes and visual forms. Metaphors reveal that within a circle, there is a Sun, and within a theory, there is a shapeless Universe. When the Sun went down behind the Freedom Tower, I thought of newborn stars forming in the heads of gas pillars.  Drawn to the edge of the abyss, the gates of the heliosphere, the mind sees the Universe as a fractal fluid of free particles. Scales are relative. And when I hear the word invariance, it is still the word convergence that resonates in my head. On the visual trail from the city skyline to nebulae and back, pillars rising from the surface of the Sun shoot arrows of plasma in the direction of the Earth. 

A bird in the shadow flew over the neighbor’s locust tree across from the rising Sun. The breeze carried its wings. There was no cloud in the sky as it flew back a while later. A house sparrow sat on the top branch of the oak sapling outside my window. Its chirping sound pulled me out of the fog in my head. The night before, I dreamt of an elephant charging and a colossal bear sleeping on rooftops. At night, dreaming is like watching a drama unfold from the mind’s dark places to brighter horizons. In the daytime, song sparrows guided my footsteps through the enchanted forest of the Universe toward the long lateral branches of a massive white-bark tree shining in the sunlight.

Earth's Climate response to a changing Sun, Thierry Dudok de Wit,  (editor)

Cycles of time, Roger Penrose

Living with the Stars, Carolus J. Schrijver and Iris Schrijver

The heavens and their stories, Annie S. D. Maunder and Edward Walter Maunder