8 - The Chaotic Solar Cycle

Summary

PREFACE

Almost 400 hundred years ago Galileo noticed that the period of a pendulum is the same for all small amplitudes. Not long afterwards, Galileo and his contemporaries (see figure 8.1) proved that sunspots really were on the sun. So the same person was involved in discovering the paradigm of periodicity and establishing an exemplar of irregularity. But just how irregularly do sunspots behave? In modern terms, this question comes down to asking how many degrees of freedom are involved in the phenomenon. If the mechanism I am going to describe here, on/off intermittency, is operative, this question cannot be answered soon (Platt, Spiegel & Tresser 1993a). That I should begin this discussion by mentioning aperiodicity is a sign of where we are in the long saga of sunspot studies. Shortly after Galileo's discoveries, serious work on sunspots got under way. This was somewhat disappointing for a time because sunspots had become quite scarce, with only a few per year being detected. This intermission in solar activity lasted approximately throughout the life of Newton, being most extreme when he was in his prime and ending about a decade before his death (Eddy 1978). So the question of the changing level of solar activity must have been much on astronomers' minds at that time. By the time this puzzle was fadinga from memory, a new issue was raised in the middle of the nineteenth century, when it was noticed that the level of solar activity (as judged mainly by sunspots) was found to vary with some regularity.