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)

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.

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)

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?