Strange "Wave" Phenomenon on the Sun

[theartist 150]

A strange wave phenomenon is going on right now on the sun.  It is observed in multiple wavelengths as a string of small bright-points up in the corona, but its imprint, if one looks carefully, can also be seen down on the photosphere.

 

Have any of you seen this before?  Do you have an explanation?  I kind of sense this is a clue that might possibly challenge some conventional dynamo-theory models.  Does it possibly suggest 'near surface' magnetic imprints on the photosphere can be induced from disturbance in the solar atmosphere? 

We know from helioseismology that there is possibly (what is termed) a 'jet-stream' flow (though quite slow) below the photosphere, but per my (albeit limited) understanding, that is a long-standing flow-pattern developed over multiple years throughout the solar cycle. I also don't think (but I'm not sure) current helioseismology theories explain the development of this particular wavy pattern we are observing. Here is a quickly developed "wave" pattern extending clear across the observed solar disk, imprinted on the photosphere and up into the corona.  

Are there any experienced solar physicists in the house that would like to offer their opinion?

If I'm the first person to call this pattern out (i.e., a 'first' discovery), does the phenomenon get named after me, like comet discoverers get the comet named after them?😀  If so, let's call it "the solar-artist's wave". 😊

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The following references may (or may not) not be (somewhat) applicable:

1.  "Solar and Stellar Nonradial Oscillations, Wave Propagation and Heating of the Upper Atmosphere", L. Paterno (1988)

2.  "The quest for the solar g modes", Appourchaux, et.al. (2010)

3.  "Gigantic Waves That Control Earth's Weather Have Once Again Been Detected Roaring Across The Sun". "Solar Rossby waves have very small amplitudes and periods of several months, thus they are extremely difficult to detect,"..."All in all, we find large-scale waves of vorticity on the Sun that move in the direction opposite to rotation. That these waves are only seen in the equatorial regions is completely unexpected."

Edited November 22, 2019 by theartist

[theartist 150]

🤔A main takeaway is that this wavy string of bright-points we are observing today is something that may be so rare of a chance occurrence that you may not see it manifest like this again in your lifetime.  🤓

The conditions of a very quiet sun in a deep solar minimum are a likely enabler.

[theartist 150]

Folks, I dunno what is going on here, but we are seeing something similar again today, three days later, manifesting at a lower latitude:

Edited November 25, 2019 by theartist

[theartist 150]

One can now see the ring of bright-points extending around on the east side of the sun in the STEREO-A imagery:

 

I would not be surprised if this ring of bright-points completely encircles our star. Surely this phenomenon we are currently observing has something to do with the quiescent state of our sun in the throes of a deep solar minimum.🤓   

[theartist 150]

Is it not interesting that the current "Line-of Sight Ecliptic-Plane Field Plot"  model is similar to the wave of bright-points observed in the above imagery?🤓

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For comparison, here is what a model looks like during solar maximum:

So did a similar behavior manifest during the last solar minimum, and if so, where in the timeline?  🤔

Let's go back and look at the model, shall we?😀

(to be continued)

Edited November 27, 2019 by theartist

[Vancanneyt Sander 276]

We received an anonymous response to this topic:

Quote

False information. Solar maximum is not solar minimum. All the sun is doing is getting ready for SC25 to cycle upward. those wavy bands of loops are not a sign of a solar deep minimum. It's just natures state of progression. Noone will know the secrets of it's dynamo forever.

I don't see any strange things on the solar images. The spots are nothing out of the ordinary, the line you say they form is rather coincidence and doesn't reflect on magnetogram. brighter zones on the disk are more often at the line of where sunspots may form or where sunspots are so it's normal to mee that there are some bright spots near the equator as we are in solar minimum. Once SC25 gets through we'll see spots higher and lost likely some bright spots without regions in the higher latitude. 

[theartist 150]

Vancanneyt, there are two messages here and I'll take them in order.

On 11/28/2019 at 9:29 AM, Vancanneyt Sander said:

False information. Solar maximum is not solar minimum. 

🙄What is "false" about what I presented?  I took the images right off of SDO.  

On 11/28/2019 at 9:29 AM, Vancanneyt Sander said:

Solar maximum is not solar minimum.

🙄Was the person sending this message of sober mind?  Where did I state, or even suggest that "solar maximum is solar minimum"?  C'mon Vancanneyt, you didn't ask 'anonymous' what they were referring to here?

On 11/28/2019 at 9:29 AM, Vancanneyt Sander said:

All the sun is doing is getting ready for SC25 to cycle upward.

🙄 What is the point of this statement?  We all know we are eventually going up into SC25, and we are currently in the SC24/25 transition epoch. So.....?  

On 11/28/2019 at 9:29 AM, Vancanneyt Sander said:

those wavy bands of loops are not a sign of a solar deep minimum.

So this is the problem, eh?  

1. First of all, regardless of what those "loops" indicate, we are absolutely, incontrovertibly, already in a deep solar minimum.  I direct 'anonymous' to a whole host of threads I've started on this forum for the evidence (for example, this one,  "Synoptic Magnetograms; SC24 Minimum Forecasting", particularly evaluating Table 1. and Table 2. in that thread, or this one F10.7cm Solar Minimum Analysis, where F10.7cm is compared between cycles:).  I can also direct 'anonymous' to a host of scientific literature in agreement with this fact.
2. Since we ARE in a deep solar minimum, the question arises as to whether this 'rare' (my view) occurrence of wavy bright-points extending around the circumference of the sun is related to being in a deep solar minimum.  My theory is that "YES, it has a lot to do with it."

So I ask whether 'anonymous', or Vancanneyt Sander actually spent some time looking at the "Line-of Sight Ecliptic-Plane Field Plot" models (https://gong2.nso.edu/products/scaleView/view.php?configFile=configs/pfssModels.cfg&productIndex=5) (I provided a link earlier) in order to:

1. get a feel for how they change with the change of the photospheric magnetic-structures on the sun; 
2. compare the behavior of these models in the current solar minimum with the previous SC23/24 transition (which ALSO was a very deep solar minimum)?

On 11/28/2019 at 9:29 AM, Vancanneyt Sander said:

it's normal to mee that there are some bright spots near the equator as we are in solar minimum.

Yes, but I suggest it is NOT typical to see such a long line of bright points, in a rather flat wave, coincidentally extending for a considerable portion of the sun's circumference. That was the hypothesis.  Have you ever seen that before, was the opening question to the thread?  

On 11/28/2019 at 9:29 AM, Vancanneyt Sander said:

Once SC25 gets through we'll see spots higher and lost likely some bright spots without regions in the higher latitude.

This is obvious and has nothing to do with what I contend is an observance of a "relatively rare" solar phenomenon.  I contend there are a couple of things that both have to happen, in conjunction, for the occurrence of this phenomenon:

1. The magnetic state of the sun has to be very "tranquil" and "hemispherically balanced", and
2. Even with those two conditions resulting from a deep solar minimum, the corona still has to cooperate to produce a string of bright-points at considerable distance along the magnetic polarity line.

On 11/28/2019 at 9:29 AM, Vancanneyt Sander said:

Noone will know the secrets of it's dynamo forever.

This is also an interesting statement from "anonymous"; in the context of their other statements, can Vancanneyt Sander  or "anonymous" please elaborate further what they are driving at?

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Over the last couple of days, I had started looking through the literature in order to better understand what these models were representing, to see if there was more than a "coincidence" with the bright-points.  While I'm still looking for a paper of interest I had come across in that search, here is another applicable paper:

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1984PhDT.........5H/abstract  "The solar wind in the heliosphere is organized into large regions in which the magnetic field has a component either toward or away from the sun. The model predicts the location of the current sheet separating these regions. Near solar minimum, in 1976, the current sheet lay within a few degrees of the solar equator having two extensions north and south of the equator. Soon after minimum the latitudinal extent began to increase." 

The idea is that possibly these models will provide a clue as to where the Solar Minimum Nadir is temporally located.

 

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On 11/28/2019 at 10:41 AM, theartist said:

I had started looking through the literature in order to better understand what these models were representing

The following statement stuck out from the Babcock paper titled, "The Sun's Polar Magnetic Field":  "During the minimum phase of the sunspot cycle...polar fields have extended on rare occasions nearly to the solar equator."

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On 11/28/2019 at 10:41 AM, theartist said:

On 11/28/2019 at 9:29 AM, Vancanneyt Sander said:

Solar maximum is not solar minimum.

🙄Was the person sending this message of sober mind?  Where did I state, or even suggest that "solar maximum is solar minimum"?  C'mon Vancanneyt, you didn't ask 'anonymous' what they were referring to here?

and...

On 11/28/2019 at 9:29 AM, Vancanneyt Sander said:

Noone will know the secrets of it's dynamo forever.

After reflecting on these postings some more, I'm thinking possibly that english is not the primary language of "anonymous".  I'm now (guessing) that what they were trying to say, is that "regardless of what happens in solar minimum, it will not necessarily be reflected at solar maximum, and no one will ever be able to figure out the secrets of the dynamo". Such thoughts are founded on the idea that the sun's magnetic behavior is totally chaotic, with no discernible trends from minimum-to-maximum, let alone from cycle-to-cycle.  On the contrary, scientists (based on decades of observations) have long rejected this view.  One term scientists use in discussing the solar cycle is 'quasi-periodic', with quasi-periodicity manifested in attributes like strength and magnitude (reflected in the sunspot number proxy).  But depending on the context, 'quasi-periodic' is not very definitive, without getting into the specifics of a wide array of implications.

Edited November 29, 2019 by theartist
Added the link to the models.

[theartist 150]

Hi noobsauce, welcome to the forum.

On 12/2/2019 at 5:20 PM, noobsauce said:

Our small star must somehow be subject to some of these magnetic (gravitational) forces galactic center forces and behave accordingly?

Which is it, magnetic or gravitational forces?  Possibly "somehow", but on what order-of-magnitude, and on what timescale, relative to the electromagnetic perturbations and gravitational forces generated within our own solar system (some questions you might consider to guide your theoretical research into the matter)? 

Consider (per this source) the strongest structured magnetic fields of spiraling galaxies in the interarm regions are ~15μG (1.5nT), while magnetic fluctuations within our sun's solar wind at 1 AU are +/- 10-20nT [although the 27-day averages of the Interplanetary Magnetic Field are less than 10nT (per OMNIweb)] :

(I dropped a list of various other order-of-magnitude magnetic field strengths on page 2 of the thread titled,  F10.7cm Solar Minimum Analysis.)

Edited December 5, 2019 by theartist

[theartist 150]

On 11/28/2019 at 10:41 AM, theartist said:

The following statement stuck out from the Babcock paper titled, "The Sun's Polar Magnetic Field":  "During the minimum phase of the sunspot cycle...polar fields have extended on rare occasions nearly to the solar equator."

So now at this deep minimum point in the current solar cycle, the development of spatially large global magnetic fields enables the development of very large prominences before they are sloughed off, unlike more chaotic magnetic periods when active photospheric magnetic structures on the disk break up the large fields, thus not allowing such large prominences to grow.  

So just in the past 48 hours, one can see the increased activity of these very large prominences being released from the sun.  In the images below, I point out some examples of what to look for,  but I recommend going over to SDO to watch the 48 hour movies to really enjoy the show.

 

Edited December 12, 2019 by theartist
Added the word "spatially" for clarification.

[goldminor 37]

Very interesting, but isn't there a second line of interest? It looks to me as if there is a second similar pattern which starts on the left side of those pics, and then angles down at approximately 45 degrees towards the south. I note that it is apparent in the STEREO A pics of the east limb.

Edited December 13, 2019 by goldminor

[theartist 150]

Welcome to the forum, goldminor.

11 hours ago, goldminor said:

Very interesting, but isn't there a second line of interest?

So are these lines of bright points associated with some underlying phenomenon, or a chance random occurrence?  

Maybe some statements from Strong et. al (1992) provide some ideas:

(source)

"Plasma waves"!🤓😁 

I'm leaning to the possibility that the genesis of this transitory phenomenon, at least in this case, is on this side of the photosphere (i.e., in the atmosphere), with signatures consequently induced on the photosphere, rather than due to large cells underneath the surface; that is to say, a magnetic inversion line of plasma 'shear' in the solar 'atmosphere' is inducing the BP's.

Edited December 13, 2019 by theartist

[theartist 150]

On 12/13/2019 at 7:42 AM, theartist said:

I'm leaning to the possibility that the genesis of this transitory phenomenon, at least in this case, is on this side of the photosphere (i.e., in the atmosphere), with signatures consequently induced on the photosphere, rather than due to large cells underneath the surface; that is to say, a magnetic inversion line of plasma 'shear' in the solar 'atmosphere' is inducing the BP's.

However, in further consideration of the last figure I annotated above (the one with four dotted lines), it does give the impression that those lines could indeed be circumscribing large convective cells within the sun. In either case, it is the nature of the sun's very quiescent state in this deep solar minimum that is providing the opportunity to observe such phenomena.

Edited December 14, 2019 by theartist

[goldminor 37]

On 12/5/2019 at 3:24 AM, theartist said:

Hi noobsauce, welcome to the forum.

Which is it, magnetic or gravitational forces?  Possibly "somehow", but on what order-of-magnitude, and on what timescale, relative to the electromagnetic perturbations and gravitational forces generated within our own solar system (some questions you might consider to guide your theoretical research into the matter)? 

Consider (per this source) the strongest structured magnetic fields of spiraling galaxies in the interarm regions are ~15μG (1.5nT), while magnetic fluctuations within our sun's solar wind at 1 AU are +/- 10-20nT [although the 27-day averages of the Interplanetary Magnetic Field are less than 10nT (per OMNIweb)] :

(I dropped a list of various other order-of-magnitude magnetic field strengths on page 2 of the thread titled,  F10.7cm Solar Minimum Analysis.)

I can't help but notice the unusual beginning to the OMNI graph. I approach all of this from the perspective of "What drives the climate system?". Reading graphs my mind sees cycles within the patterns shown on decent high res graphs. Five years back I became good enough to start making some successful forecasts/predictions. A key part to this is placement of where the shift points of the short pattern trends occur as well as the shift points for longer cyclic events such as a Gleissberg or GSM. So to my mind it ended up like this  starting from 1885/86 to 1915/16 = cool trend, 1915/16 to 1946/47 = warm trend, 1946/47 to 1976/77 = cool trend, 1976/77 to 2006/07 = warm trend, and of course next up is a cool trend, but note that the beginning stages of a cool trend can readily be hidden when the previous warm trend was above average in extent. Nature is mostly always gradual as it shifts signs warm to cool.

 

Back to your OMNI graph though. The beginning of the graph is obviously some anomalous event. What is causing that? The Oulo monitor also shows an unusual pattern  between 1971 through 1978 where the gcr count moves sideways across that entire period. That period of time is also the shift point from a cool trend to the next warm trend. Back in those years in early 1970s I was looking forward to witnessing the next great West Coast flood. The previous two struck in 1964/65 and in 1955/56. I had heard that some scientists thought this was a 9 year cyclic trend which would have placed the next flood in 1973/74, but that does not happen. Now I think that this was in part due to what happens when a trend shifts from one state to the next, and that the clues as to why lie in the unusual readings on your graph as well as the unusual readings seen on the Oulo Monitor.

 

Currently, my ongoing prediction for the next Pacific Northwest flood cycle is for the winter of 2026/27 based off of the last 3 flood winters of 2016/16, 2006/07 and 1996/97. This has implications for the ENSO regions and the state of the sun because as you can see from the flood years listed that they all occur within the window of a solar minimum, and the ENSO regions in all cases were negative. This imo, gives a direct clue as to where the next minimum will begin along with an approximation of the ending of the minimum.

[theartist 150]

13 minutes ago, goldminor said:

The Oulo monitor also shows an unusual pattern  between 1971 through 1978 where the gcr count moves sideways across that entire period.

Good stuff; I was assembling thoughts today regarding the energy balance of our 'solar fusion reactor'.  Its energy output in the form of mass is far far exceeded by the energy in the form of electromagnetic radiant energy, but the former is far more consequential to space weather. 

Edited December 15, 2019 by theartist

[theartist 150]

Folks, wait until you see the "WAVE" that is currently making its way across the solar disk!  One really has to see it in order to believe it!  It is best observed in the 171Angstrom wavelength (putting it up in the Upper Transition Region).🤓  It is a thick line of what I'm calling 'plasma whirls'.  One really needs to watch the growth progression of this line in an animation/movie in order to better grasp that the whirls are not randomly placed, but instead truly are forming a line.

[goldminor 37]

On 12/14/2019 at 11:24 PM, theartist said:

Folks, wait until you see the "WAVE" that is currently making its way across the solar disk!  One really has to see it in order to believe it!  It is best observed in the 171Angstrom wavelength (putting it up in the Upper Transition Region).🤓  It is a thick line of what I'm calling 'plasma whirls'.  One really needs to watch the growth progression of this line in an animation/movie in order to better grasp that the whirls are not randomly placed, but instead truly are forming a line.

I also noticed that "belt" the other day. Was going to say something, but want to be cautious when looking at perceived patterns on the sun. I am very basic in my understanding of solar functions. I have always been a quick learner though.  Now I see that we both saw the same patterns, and we both wondered why?

[theartist 150]

3 hours ago, goldminor said:

I also noticed that "belt" the other day.

It seemed to progress over only a ~6-7 hour period; the frame rate loss in fidelity in their 48 hour video somewhat obscures the details of how it evolved.