What is the Solar Cycle?
The solar cycle is a period of time under a calendar system during which a leap year day takes place on each of the seven days of the week. This means every possible combination of days and dates happens at least once during a solar cycle. Under the current Gregorian calendar system used in most of the world, the solar cycle is 400 years. Until the 16th century, the solar cycle was much shorter. Before this time, most countries used the Julian calendar, named after Julius Caesar. This had the simple rule of 365 days a year, with an extra day on February 29th every fourth year, known as a leap year. The way the Julian calendar works out means that if Friday 29th falls on a Monday in a particular year, it will be 28 years until the next time it does so. This period is the solar cycle. In 1582, several European countries switched to a system known as the Gregorian calendar. Other countries switched to the system over the next 350 years and it is now the standard system in most of the worl
The amount of magnetic flux that rises up to the Sun’s surface varies with time in a cycle called the solar cycle. This cycle lasts 11 years on average. This cycle is sometimes referred to as the sunspot cycle. Near the minimum of the solar cycle, it is rare to see sunspots on the Sun, and the spots that do appear are very small and short-lived. During this “solar maximum”, there will be sunspots visible on the Sun almost all the time (often there are more than 100 spots visible at a time!), and some of those spots will be very large (up to 50,000 km in diameter) and last several weeks. There was a sunspot maximum in 1989-1990 and we expect another one in 2000-2001. Sunspots are regions where the solar magnetic field is very strong. In visible light, sunspots appear darker than their surroundings because they are a few thousand degrees cooler than their surroundings. Most of the visible surface of the Sun has a temperature of about 5400 degrees C, but in a big sunspot the temperature c
In the Julian calendar the relationship between the days of the week and the dates of the year is repeated in cycles of 28 years. In the Gregorian calendar this is still true for periods that do not cross years that are divisible by 100 but not by 400. A period of 28 years is called a Solar Cycle. The “Solar Number” of a year is found as: Solar Number = (year + 8) mod 28 + 1 In the Julian calendar there is a one-to-one relationship between the Solar Number and the day on which a particular date falls. (The leap year cycle of the Gregorian calendar is 400 years, which is 146,097 days, which curiously enough is a multiple of 7. So in the Gregorian calendar the equivalent of the “Solar Cycle” would be 400 years, not 7*400=2800 years as one might be tempted to believe.
Hello. Thank you for reading this question. I am really stuck on this question for science class. What are solar cycles and could a part of the solar cycle affect earth? I hope you can answer this question. again, thank you for your time. The term ‘solar cycle’ refers to a cycle of how active the Sun is and has a period of 11 years. It is thought that the luminosity, (or how bright the Sun is) may vary with this, and since all the energy on the Earth comes from the Sun, this could have a big effect on our climate. A nice website on all this is Sunspots and the Solar Cycle.
