Sunday, October 28, 2018

Increased Cosmic Rays - Solar minimum

I looked into data to see if the current solar minimum (cycle #24) has a impact on increased cosmic rays. The data I used was :

1) Sunspot data from Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussels (WDC-SILCO-SIDC) with
2) Galactic Cosmic Rays data from University of Oulo, Finland

The data was plot starting from Jan 2009 till last month Sept 30, 2018. At least, the graph is showing an inverse correlation between solar minimum/maximum and cosmic radiation min/max. 

Graph by Pascal Hilkens - Credit SILCO/SIDC & Oulu Finland
The mechanism is believed that the sun during a less active period, the sun's magnetic field will be weaker with decreasing solar wind. This solar wind acts as a shield to protect Earth against high energetic cosmic rays. During solar minimum, those high energetic cosmic rays penetrate further into Earth's atmosphere resulting in more counts/s. This is what the Neutron Monitoring System of groundstation Oulu  (Finland) detects.  
The sources of high energetic cosmic rays (typically 5-30GeV) are from beyond our Solar System and even from outside our own milky way and thus Galactic and Intergalactic. For that we talk about (Inter)Galactic Cosmic Rays.