Which statement about sunspots is false

In another English astronomer, Edward Walter Maunder, constructed the first "butterfly diagram", a graphical plot of this sunspot migration trend.

The duration of the sunspot cycle is, on average, around eleven years. However, the length of the cycle does vary. Between and the present, the sunspot cycle from one solar min to the next solar min has varied in length from as short as nine years to as long as fourteen years.

Note, however, that of the 26 solar cycles during that three-century span, 21 had a length between ten and twelve years. Arriving at a precise count of sunspots is not as straightforward as it might appear. Some spots are much larger than others, some sunspots partially merge together at their edges, and many spots appear in groups. In a Swiss astronomer named Rudolf Wolf devised an algorithm for making consistent counts of sunspots that allows comparisons between data from different observers across the centuries.

The sunspot count derived using Wolf's formula, now known as the Wolf sunspot number, is still in use today.

Wolf used data from earlier astronomers to reconstruct sunspot counts as far back as the cycle, which he dubbed "cycle 1". Since then, subsequent cycles have been numbered consecutively, so the cycle that began with the solar minimum is cycle This graph shows the number of sunspots counted each year for several decades. Notice how the sunspot count rises and falls in an year cycle. These eventually condensed to form the gassy outer giants — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

The tiny bit of heavier elements that remained made up the rockier Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. Through a combination of gentle collisions and gravity these atoms and molecules began attracting other like-sized material. Over millions of years, they gradually shaped themselves into solid planetesimals, and later protoplanets with their own unique orbits. Astronomers call all this smashing and joining together accretion.

After 10 to million years of this banging, eight spherical, stable planets remained. Our Solar System spun into place. Our Sun was born within a dense nebula 4.

Gas and dust contracted into a giant cloud, then floated in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way. As our Sun aged, it grew larger, brighter, and hotter — eventually causing nuclear fusion in the protons at the centers of its atoms. As they exploded, a tiny bit of matter transformed into a great deal of energy, bursting into sunshine.

The Sun was born. The Sun is currently stable, about halfway through its lifecycle. It's estimated it will live for about another five billion years before consuming all the hydrogen in its core and transforming into a red giant.

Our Sun is continually growing. The greater a star's mass, the shorter its lifecycle. High-mass stars live for one million to tens of millions of years. Low-mass stars, like our Sun, live for tens of millions to trillions of years.

When the Sun is about nine billion years old, it will begin to expand rapidly. Red giants are stars that have exhausted the supply of hydrogen in their cores. Their outer envelope is lower in temperature, giving them a reddish-orange hue. As the red giant burns out, it will collapse into a planetary nebula.

The outer layers of gas are ejected and the star's core contracts into a white dwarf. As the planetary nebula collapses further, the star becomes a white dwarf. Then finally, with all its energy exhausted, it — theoretically — expires into a black dwarf. The possibility of the black dwarf stage has not yet been proven, because not enough time has passed since the Big Bang to create one. Forces flatten a young solar system and it begins swirling as a protoplanetary disk of gas and dust.

The central stellar embryo may still "feed" off the material collapsing around it and continue to grow. For millions of years debris orbits a young star. Chunks of surviving matter not consumed by the voracious stellar embryo collide, combine, and later form planets through accretion.

About 4. Bursts of super-hot plasma on the Sun can sometimes rise to a height more than 30 times the diameter of the Earth. The explosive activity can also generate "solar winds" that may affect the weather on Earth. Things like its oceans, atmosphere, diverse land features, and moderate temperatures make Earth an oddity in our known Universe.

Most mountains on the Earth form as tectonic plates crash together under its surface. Not so for the Moon, where for millions of years asteroids pounded the surface, creating its peaks and valleys. Jupiter is our Solar System's largest planet. Like a star, it's primarily made of hydrogen and helium. But Jupiter never heated up and remains a cold, gassy goliath. A collage of color shows swirling clouds around Jupiter's Great Red Spot — a persistent, year old, hurricane-like storm.

The storm is so large that two or three Earths would fit within it. New elements, combined with the just-right Goldilocks Conditions came together and formed our Solar System. Though Earth was neatly orbiting the Sun as a rocky mass four and a half billion years ago, no organism could survive there. Radiation from the recent supernova kept the planet extremely hot, its surface molten, and oxygen was non-existent. Plus, incredibly massive meteorites and asteroids frequently slammed onto the surface — creating even more heat.

The Earth got so hot, it began melting. Heavier material sank to the bottom, lighter stuff rose to the top. Some elements evaporated. This transformation created the Earth's layered core and mantle, crust, and atmosphere. Even today the Earth undergoes constant change. Shifting, sliding, and colliding tectonic plates "surf" atop its semi-molten mantle. This relentless drifting speeds along at the rate of fingernail growth, yet causes mountains to rise, volcanoes to erupt, and earthquakes to strike.

It took billions of years for the Earth to form and settle into orbit around the Sun. But how do we know that? What makes it so? These questions burned and plagued astronomers for millennia. To study the movements of heavens back then, you would look up into the sky. You would see the Sun and stars revolve around the very spot where you were standing, the Earth — just as Ptolemy did some 1, years ago.

This geocentric view, backed by the very powerful religions at the time, endured for more than 1, years until it was toppled by Copernicus and confirmed by Galileo.

Through their observational evidence, and by using the newly invented telescope, they produced data and logic supporting a Sun-centered, heliocentric model of the Solar System. Through these revolutionary findings, geocentrism began to crumble. In the later s, Newton developed his three basic laws of motion and the theory of universal gravity by combining physics, mathematics, and astronomy.

These ideas laid the foundation for our current understanding of the Earth and the cosmos, and helped astronomer Edwin Hubble construct the modern-day Big Bang theory.

The geocentric view of the cosmos held by Aristotle and Ptolemy persisted for more than 1, years. Claudius Ptolemy's theory extended the cosmological theories of Aristotle. Earth was at a center of a series of concentric spheres containing the Moon, the planets, the Sun, and a final sphere of fixed stars. A Catholic, Polish astronomer, Nicolaus Copernicus, synthesized observational data to formulate a Sun-centered cosmology, launching modern astronomy and setting off a scientific revolution.

Galileo Galilei, an Italian Renaissance man, used a telescope of his own invention to collect evidence that supported the Sun-centered model of the Solar System. By combining physics, mathematics, and astronomy, Newton developed the three basic laws of motion and the theory of universal gravity. By measuring the amount of time between the fluctuating brightness levels of variable stars, Leavitt discovered that it would be possible to estimate their distance away from the Earth, and possible to map the Universe.

Hubble drew upon existing ideas and evidence to demonstrate that the Universe was much larger than previously thought and proved that it is expanding — laying the foundations for the Big Bang theory. Historical records of sunspot counts, which go back hundreds of years, verify that this sunspot cycle has an average period of roughly eleven years.

Our Sun isn't the only star with spots. In recent years, astronomers have been able to detect "starspots" - "sunspots" on other stars. Skip to main content. More about Sunspots.