SAN FRANCISCO Will the upcoming solar maximum be the real Y2K bug, with the anticipated period of intense magnetic activity on the sun wreaking havoc on everything from cell phones to power grids?
Probably not, a group of scientists working on predicting the outcome of the solar max said Thursday.
As luck would have it, the turn of the millennium also marks the peak of the suns 11-year sunspot cycle, when sometimes hundreds of the dark splotches can appear in a single day to mar the surface of our star.
"Despite these dire predictions, this sunspot cycle will be average in strength."
The coincidence has some worried that intense solar magnetism associated with the peak of sunspot cycle 23 will do a number on a world increasingly dependent on vulnerable electronic devices.
For the sun-savvy, concerns about the solar max are the closest thing to the fear that all the worlds computers will read the year 2000 as 1900 and go haywire come January 1.
"Despite these dire predictions, this sunspot cycle will be average in strength," said Herschel Snodgrass, a professor of physics at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. Snodgrass and others addressed the issue on Thursday during the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
David Hathaway, a researcher at NASAs Marshall Space Flight Center, said his best prediction for the solar max indicates it will be accompanied by an only slightly larger than average number of sunspots.
The peak of the max should come in mid- to late 2000, or about four to five years into the suns 11-year sunspot cycle.
"It wont be as big as the last two cycles," Hathaway said. Cycles 21 and 22 were both stronger than average.
But the effects of the solar max may still be significant, said Victor Pizzo, of NOAAs Space Environment Center in Boulder, Colorado.
Fifty years ago the solar maximum affected users of shortwave radios, which receive frequencies bounced off the Earths mirror-like ionosphere -- and that was about it in the human realm.
Now, with scores of satellites in orbit, the risk to human communications greatly increases.
Pizzo said post-Cold War manufacturing practices might also play a role in the increased risk. To cut costs, computer chips flown in outer space now are rarely radiation-hardened, unlike those in satellites launched during the standoff between East and West.
That could make them more susceptible to flare-ups associated with the solar max.
"The reality is, we really dont know," Pizzo said.
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