The sun is or was apparently doing something strange.

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And I find this quite strange myself. Something totally new to me but I do not know what to make of it exactly, but it does appear that some scientists are becoming "concerned" with the way in which our sun has been acting. What do people think?

There are a few sources from within this article from October 2010 but just wondering if anyone ever "got to the bottom of it"

http://www.projectworldawareness.com/20 ... ng-matter/

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Wow, cool article. I have no idea if any of it is even remotely true though.

Nonsense on stilts. The heavy elements on and in this planet decay a a constant rate. This is not only verified by careful measurement, it follows from the basic conservation laws of physics.

As to energetic matter from the sun, the study of coronal mass ejections is still in its early phases. A great deal of new stuff will be learned as better instruments for studying our hearth star are deployed.

And it would be very nice if you posted references to genuine scientific -refereed- journals, rather than news clippings and magazine articles.

ruveyn

radioactive decay is not constant but can vary slightly depending on the season on earth (in other words the proximity to the sun)

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... ?full=true

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I saw an earlier release of this on PhysOrg months ago. I find it interesting, but not cause for the mass silliness this projectworldawareness site is promoting. It is only a fraction of a percent effect. It took the researchers months of data to determine it was not just noise or some other systematic error. The effect is barely discernible from the noise. There is no indication of a trend as your most alarming source stated, only a couple oscillation frequencies that coincide with the earth's motion about the sun and the rotation of the sun's core. And so far it has only been observed in a few isotopes.

As for carbon-dating, this probably does not affect the results in any meaningful way. The error that this would cause is much smaller than other sources of error, which knowing about the mechanism of measuring decays is probably dominated by the shot noise of measuring the carbon-14 decays.

But for physicists, any unexplained, repeatable variation like that is very interesting. The fact that the decay rate of at least some isoptopes depends on something like this could tell us more about elementary particles and nuclear physics.

I consider myself more of an expert on this topic than the journalists that wrote these articles (though not as much as the scientists who actually did the measurements, who I cannot find giving any alarmist quotes). Why? I am an atomic/molecular/optics (AMO) physicist who deals with decay rates and shot noise and the like in my measurements. I also have from my coursework a good overview of the nuclear physics involved, extremely likely much more so than any journalist.

I'm with ruveyn on this one
Also for some reason this reminds me of the underlying plot element to Roland Emmerich's film 2012, and not in a good way (not that there could be a good way lol). As the year comes closer it seems as if scientific articles will be taken out of context to create fear mongering, aka publicity, aka money for some people who are making a business off of the 2012 doomsday fiction

Something is always changing, its called life.

The earth itself was knocked slightly off its normal axis due to the large earthquake in japan/resulting tsunami. And if I usually have a question I go to wikipedia because the news tend to be fear mongerer's. Theres always something to kill us, always some upsetting story to tell...

You want the truth? We're at a solar "medium".. yes, its happened before... things are acting strangely. You want the truth? Yes, japan had a big earthquake - probably not because of the position of the super moon in relation to the earth. But ... keep in mind japan had the same earthquake with basically the same damage back at the beginning of the 1900's. Yet we're still here 100 years later. And as we head into the newer generations, with actual physically/electronically recorded information. We'll be more accustomed to what/can/will happen as time goes on. But what they're talking about in your article is vague speculative boringness. I'm more worried about the cost of gas and the resulting co2 emissions than if the sun will microwave us to death.

Because, we destroy the planets atmosphere and the sun WILL bake us... quick like.

The way which decay rates are affected is the interesting bit. what i read was that it was some time around august where they are at their fastest.

I don't really care what the source is anyway. it was not the link i posted i was even interested in it was the other articles. i dont see why 2012 is mentioned all the time either.

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