2012: A New Beginning?

“We call it a butterfly diagram, because sunspots make a pattern in this plot that looks like the wings of a butterfly,” said Dr. David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center in a NASA article about the effects that solar dynamics could have on Earth’s magnetism. Because of all the twists and turns, “the impact of the field reversal on the heliosphere is complicated,” he said.

Like Hathaway, dozens of scientists around the world are wondering how high the magnetic hostility from our “parent star”—the sun—will be in 2012, which we know will be in one of its major cycles of solar activity. According to projections, the expected rotation of the sun’s magnetic polarity acts as a sort of colossal cosmic magnet capable of altering the magnetic fields of all bodies within its heliosphere, in which our planet Earth is embedded.