Talk:2725: Sunspot Cycle

Holy cow, just made my first edit! It was SUPER stressful, and I didn't even know how to make a 'citation needed' thing. Hopefully it was ok, I tried to match the style of the wiki. GordonFreeman (talk) 03:06, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

Welcome to explain xkcd then. Any edit that is not vandalism is a good edit, because it makes other think about what should be here. So even if it is later completely changed it got things going. --Kynde (talk) 08:05, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

Is it perhaps worth mentioning that sunspots, while they're darker than the rest of the sun's surface, are not actually black. They are cooler than surrounding regions and appear dark by contrast, but they're emitting lots of IR and some visible light. A sunspots-only (ignore the oxymoron) sun would still emit light and heat, just less. Nitpicking (talk) 03:18, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

Wouldn't the cycle be 20 ("every other decade") or 22 years (11 in each half of the cycle)? 162.158.166.173 03:51, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

The cycle of darkness of the sun would be 22 years, but the 11-year cycle referred to in the comic, and described by both diagrams within the comic, is the cycle of "number of sunspots" which peaks when the sun is half light, half dark, and decreases again as there are so many spots that they start to merge into fewer, larger spots. It cycles from very few (or zero) sunspots, when the sun is light, through many sunspots, sun is heavily light/dark spotted, and completes the cycle when the number of spots returns down to near-zero, when the sun is dark. 172.70.85.201 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

To what "financial crash of 2014" does this refer? I recall the housing crisis causing financial trouble, but that was around 2008. 162.158.166.173 03:51, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

This has nothing to do with finance so if you think the peak at 2014 should have any meaning I think you are wrong. there where just for some reason more sunspots even though the sun was still in the dark period. Maybe most of the few huge sunspots broke into smaller but with only thin lines between, so still dark but the count goes up. Then they closed again later keeping the sun dark but the number of spots fluctuating. --Kynde (talk) 08:05, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

Does anyone have any idea what is supposed to be on the Y axis of the bottom graph? Something that goes up when the sun is transitioning between brightnesses and is at its lowest when the sun is either fully bright or fully dark? 108.162.241.213 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

It's the "number of spots" (whether light or dark), since a fully bright sun has no dark spots and a fully dark sun has no "light spots"Dextrous Fred (talk) 05:02, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

But what are the thin lines indicating, it it just to show that the sun is not yet really dark? Like a gray shade with very long between the dark lines? --Kynde (talk) 08:05, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

Did anyone else notice that the sine-wave is wrong? the trough should be the same every cycle, yet it's drawn as bright in the first trough and dark in the second trough. -Weylin Piegorsch 172.70.126.117 06:52, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

If you reefer to the bottom graph it is correctly drawn. The sunspots number are near zero when the sun is bright in the first through and then it is again near zero when the sun is dark as there are then only one sunspot. So that is why it is alternating between light and dark for every through. Just as shown in the upper graph. --Kynde (talk) 08:05, 17 January 2023 (UTC)--Kynde (talk) 08:05, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

I do not think it is set in an alternate universe per se, but in the images of the sun spots the minimum brightness of the whole sun is subtracted. So only the sun spots stay visible. So the sun images are depictions of our sun. The number of sun spots loses common-sense meaning after merging starts. Sebastian --162.158.86.10 07:58, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

Well since the sun is dark in this universe for 10 years, then it cannot be our universe, and since they also have 90s memes, then it is either a parallel universe or well... Randall's fantasy :-) --Kynde (talk) 08:05, 17 January 2023 (UTC)