NASA: Great Conveyor Belt could explain solar cycle

William Atkins
Monday, 15 March 2010 01:50

Science - Space

A NASA solar physicist is studying the Great Conveyor Belt on the Sun, a 40-year-cycle current of hot plasma, which may control the maximums and minimums of sunspots as part of the solar cycle.

NASA solar physicist David Hathaway (of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama) and Lisa Rightmire (of the University of Memphis, Tennessee) may be interested in listening to Johnny Cash’s song “Ring of Fire” because both scientists are studying their own version called the “Current of Fire.”

In this version, Drs. Hathaway and Rightmire have found that this current of fire, which is being called the Great Conveyor Belt, is a gigantic circulating current of hot plasma within the Sun.

They have been studying the Sun with respect to its meridional (along the lines of meridians) flow and its sunspot cycles with the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a space probe launched by the American’s NASA and the European’s ESA, or European Space Agency, in December 1995.

They gather data from SOHO every eight hours over past decade or so, ending with December 2009. They were able to study almost all of the sunspot activities during this time, showing how zones of magnetism on the Great Conveyor Belt flow toward the poles of the Sun

The March 12 , 2010 NASA media brief “Solar ‘Current of Fire’ Speeds Up” states that this belt of plasma has been circulating at exceptionally high speeds for the last five years.

These very fast speeds are around 19 to 29 miles (30 to 47 kilometers) per hour, at least, they are really fast speeds on the Sun.

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