Nov 15 1975
From The Space Library
Observation of the sun's magnetic fields might make it possible to predict weather 4 days in advance with greater reliability, said scientists at the Institute for Plasma Research at Stanford University. Investigators at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo., and at Stanford said that magnetic forces from the sun played a role in formation of pressure troughs on earth, which bring rainy weather; observations from space, corroborated from earth measurements, indicate influence on weather from solar flares, sunspots, and high velocities of the solar wind.
The weather effect involved two phenomena, the sun's magnetic sector structure and a concept called the vorticity-area index. The index is a measure of the size of low-pressure troughs in square kilometers, calculated by computer from twice-daily standard weather-service maps. As solar magnetic sectors and boundaries were measured regularly at Mt. Wilson Observatory, the Astrophysical Observatory in the Crimea, and the Stanford Solar Observatory, scientists could compare the solar magnetic structure with the vorticity-area index to see whether the sun structure affected the nature and size of low-pressure troughs that bring rain and stormy weather. (NYT, 16 Nov 75, 40)
A nova that exploded about 10 000 yr ago and attracted the attention of primitive farmers in the Near East may have been a stimulus to the rise of man's first known civilization, according to the New York Times. Reporter Boyce Rensberger, writing on the theory published in the Explorers Journal by amateur scholar George Michanowsky, described clues found by Michanowsky in cuneiform texts regarding a gigantic star in the constellation Vela. No particularly bright star was to be found in Vela in modern times, Michanowsky pointed out, but astronomers had agreed that a supernova of uncertain date had probably been the forerunner of the present Gum nebula, a huge glowing cloud of hot gases centered on a relatively cold pulsar. Occurrence of the supernova had been placed anywhere from 6000 to 15 000 yr ago. In the times after the starburst, the primitive peoples-especially Sumerians-developed astronomy, mathematics, and writing; Michanowsky had suggested that the supernova had stimulated great attention to stellar phenomena and led to a more careful study of the heavens, to formal astronomy and mathematics, and to the need to make written records. (NYT, 15 Nov 75, 29)
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