Schwabe, of Dessau, began in 1826 to study the solar surface, and,
after many years of work, arrived at a law of frequency which has been
more fruitful of results than any discovery in solar physics.[5] In
1843 he announced a decennial period of maxima and minima of sun-spot
displays. In 1851 it was generally accepted, and, although a period of
eleven years has been found to be more exact, all later observations,
besides the earlier ones which have been hunted up for the purpose, go
to establish a true periodicity in the number of sun-spots. But quite
lately Schuster[6] has given reasons for admitting a number of
co-existent periods, of which the eleven-year period was predominant in
the nineteenth century.
In 1851 Lament, a Scotchman at Munich, found a decennial period in the
daily range of magnetic declination. In 1852 Sir Edward Sabine
announced a similar period in the number of “magnetic storms” affecting
all of the three magnetic elements—declination, dip, and intensity.
Australian and Canadian observations both showed the decennial period
in all three elements. Wolf, of Zurich, and Gauthier, of Geneva, each
independently arrived at the same conclusion.
It took many years before this coincidence was accepted as certainly
more than an accident by the old-fashioned astronomers, who want rigid
proof for every new theory. But the last doubts have long vanished, and
a connection has been further traced between violent outbursts of solar
activity and simultaneous magnetic storms.
The frequency of the Aurora Borealis was found by Wolf to follow the
same period. In fact, it is closely allied in its cause to terrestrial
magnetism. Wolf also collected old observations tracing the periodicity
of sun-spots back to about 1700 A.D.
Spoerer deduced a law of dependence of the average latitude of
sun-spots on the phase of the sun-spot period.
All modern total solar eclipse observations seem to show that the shape
of the luminous corona surrounding the moon at the moment of totality
has a special distinct character during the time of a sun-spot maximum,
and another, totally different, during a sun-spot minimum.
A suspicion is entertained that the total quantity of heat received by
the earth from the sun is subject to the same period. This would have
far-reaching effects on storms, harvests, vintages, floods, and
droughts; but it is not safe to draw conclusions of this kind except
from a very long period of observations.
Solar photography has deprived astronomers of the type of Carrington of
the delight in devoting a life’s work to collecting data. It has now
become part of the routine work of an observatory.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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