Description
Book SynopsisThis book takes an excursion through solar science, science history, and geoclimate with a husband and wife team who revealed some of our sun's most stubborn secrets.E Walter and Annie S D Maunder's work helped in understanding our sun's chemical, electromagnetic and plasma properties. They knew the sun's sunspot migration patterns and its variable, climate-affecting, inactive and active states in short and long time frames. An inactive solar period starting in the mid-seventeenth century lasted approximately seventy years, one that E Walter Maunder worked hard to make us understand: the Maunder Minimum of c 1620-1720 (which was posthumously named for him).With ongoing concern over global warming, and the continuing failure to identify root causes driving earth's climatic changes, the Maunders' story outlines how our cyclical sun can alter climate. The book goes on to view the sun-earth connection in terms of geomagnetic variation and climatic change; contemporary views on the sun's operating mechanisms are explored, and the effects these have on the earth over long and short time scales are pondered.If not a call to widen earth's climate research to include the sun, this book strives to illustrate how solar causes and effects can influence earth's climate in ways we must understand in order to enhance solar system research and our well-being.
Table of ContentsA sun most pure and most lucid; background of the Maunder Minimum; the Maunder Minimum - Europe, Asia, North America; surveying the Maunder Minimum; Maunder's early life and associations; the family Maunder - the BAA and astronomy for all; a particle theory for the sun-Earth connection; our knowledge of the sun and its variability today; cycles of the sun and their tie to Earth; the Maunders and their final story. (Part contents)
