Nature's third cycle : a story of sunspots / Arnab Rai Choudhuri.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Choudhuri, Arnab Rai, 1956- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sunspots--Popular works.

Sunspots.

Genre:

Popular works.

Physical Description:

xii, 281 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, [2015]

Contents:

1 Explosions, Blackouts and Cycles 1

1.1 Explosions on the Sun 1

1.2 A Recurring Cosmic Illness 7

1.3 Nature's Third Cycle 11

1.4 The Magnetic Breakthrough 14

1.5 A Timeline 20

2 The Mysterious Sunspots 22

2.1 Sunspots Reveal the Sun's Rotation 22

2.2 The Little Ice Age 24

2.3 The Solar Butterflies 28

2.4 The Solar Magnets 32

2.5 The Central Dogma 40

2.6 A Road Map 47

3 Here Comes the Sun 49

3.1 Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star 49

3.2 The Structure of Stars 53

3.3 Peeping into the Interior of the Sun 59

3.4 How Will the Sun Die? 62

3.5 Neutrinos: Mysterious Messengers from the Sun's Core 69

3.6 The Vibrating Sun 72

3.7 Rotation Rate of the Sun's Interior 75

3.8 A Postscript 80

4 The Fourth State of Matter 81

4.1 An Electromagnetic Interlude 81

4.2 What is a Plasma? 85

4.3 The Reality of Fields 89

4.4 Making Little Suns in Our Laboratories 92

4.5 Coils, Magnetic Flux and Electromagnetic Induction 97

4.6 Plasmas and Flux Freezing 101

4.7 A Part of the Central Dogma Explained 107

4.8 A Turning Point in Our Journey 109

5 Floating Magnetic Buoys 110

5.1 Boiling a Magnetic Field 110

5.2 Simulating the Physical World on Our Computers 115

5.3 Magnetic Buoyancy 118

5.4 A Personal Note 121

5.5 Flux Rings and the Coriolis Force 126

5.6 Back to the Homeland 133

5.7 Joy's Law Explained 136

5.8 Quo Vadis? 141

6 Dynamos in the Sky 143

6.1 Breaking the Symmetry with Turbulence 143

6.2 Parker's Turbulent Dynamo 148

6.3 The Oeuvre from East Germany 154

6.4 The End of the Road? 159

7 The Conveyor Belt inside the Sun 163

7.1 The Conveyor Belt inside the Sun 163

7.1 The Death of Sunspots and the Aftermath 163

7.2 The Missing Link: A Mysterious Flow 167

7.3 The Flux Transport Dynamo Model 174

7.4 A Critique of the Flux Transport Dynamo 183

8 A Journey from the Sun to the Earth 187

8.1 Strange Connections 187

8.2 The Beautiful Corona and a Wind from it 192

8.3 Bones of the Corona and the Secret of Heating 202

8.4 When Magnetic Field Lines Swap Partners 208

8.5 Arrivals at the Station Earth 211

8.6 A Grand Landscape 215

9 We Look Before and After 219

9.1 What the Trees and the Ice Tell Us 219

9.2 Blow Hot and Blow Cold 222

9.3 Searching for Correlations 227

9.4 Gearing Up for the Challenge 232

9.5 The Die is Cast 234

9.6 The Verdict from the Sun-God 240

9.7 Jerks in the Conveyor Bell 244

9.8 A Human Tailpiece 248

10 Epilogue: Dynamos are Forever 249.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780199674756

0199674752

OCLC:

897881189