January 17 bulletin

VOLUME 2, Nº 5

DATE: JANUARY 2017

Reach the Sky Bulletin TEAM COUNTRY CURIOSITY ARTICLE: ROMANIA Romania is coastal country in the Southeastern Europe. Romania borders the Black Sea, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Hungary, Serbia, and Moldova. The capital city of Romania is Bukarešta, which has got almost 2 millions people. The official language is Romanian.

Romania is administratively divided into 41 districts (romunsko- Judet), the capital city of Bucharest has a special status (romunsko Bucureşti).In Romania lives around 20 million people.

With an area of 238,391 square kilometres (92,043 sq miles), Romania is the largest country in Southeastern Europe and the twelfth-largest in Europe. The currency of Romania is the Romanian New Leu (RON).

Romania is also a member of Europein Union, from 2007, but it isn't adopted the Euro as a single currency.

Tourist areas are along the coast of the Black Sea, the Danube Delta, winter sports and hunting in the Carpathians and numerous spas and monasteries in Moldova.

Pecica is a town in Arad County, Romania. In ancient times it was a Dacian fortress called Ziridava and today it is an important archeological site. It is situated at 25 kilometres (16 miles) from Arad. The town administers three villages: Bodrogu Vechi (Óbodrog), Sederhat (Szederhát) and Turnu (Tornya). In Pecica lives 13.000 people and its surface is 237,2 km2.

In Pecica there is a Liceul Teoretic Gheorghe Lazar. That school is also in the project Reach the Sky, with four others . There will also be a student exchange in next year (2017).

A lot of people knows Romania and Transylvania like a country where vampire count Vladimir Dracula lived.

Transylvania is a region that occupies the western and central part of today's Romania. It’s a place where more than 7 million of people live. Its surface is 102,83 km2. Most of the credit for this has Bram Stoker, the English writer, the literary whose proposals were also recorded several films. Prince Vlad Tepes lived in the 15th century and had really a lot of deal with blood, but more than drinking, with pouring. He was known for the fact that his

enemies (mostly Turks) intimidated so that he did put them on poles. It has worked in such a way that the Order was not damaged vital organs and the victim survived for next 48 hours.

The building in which Parliament operates today, is the third largest building in the world. Build it gave Ceausescu and that it can be built had to be demolished 10,000 dwellings, remove 22 churches and forcibly evicted 40,000 people. The building is 270 m long, 240 m wide and 86m high and has a 92m deep underground works. It has 1,100 rooms in twelve floors. It is estimated to have been built from a million cubic meters of marble brought from Transylvania, 3,500 tons of crystal used for the 480 and the 1,400 chandeliers light, 900,000 cubic meters of wood parquet and 200,000 square meters of woolen preprog- all of exclusively Romanian materials. The facility was built by 700 architects and 20,000 workers 24 hours per day in three shifts just over four years.

Nadja Blazinšek Slovenia

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SLEEPING IN SPACE

How do astronauts sleep in space?

After a long day at work, nothing is better than a good night's sleep! Just like on Earth, in space a worker goes to bed at a certain time, then wakes up and prepares for work again. There are a few differences though. Space has no "up" or "down," but it does have microgravity. As a result, astronauts are weightless and can sleep in any orientation. However, they have to attach themselves so they don't float around and bump into something.

After a hard day of work astronauts need somewhere to sleep, only there aren’t enough rooms for beds on the International Space Station so they need to get a little creative. It might sound like a difficult thing to do but the sleep pods look like a nice place to get some rest, especially in the comfort of zero gravity!

Space station crews usually sleep in sleeping bags located in small crew cabins. Each crew cabin is just big enough for one person.

Generally, astronauts are scheduled for eight hours of sleep at the end of each mission day. Like on Earth, though, they may wake up in the middle of their sleep period to use the toilet, or stay up late and look out the window. Different things such as excitement or motion sickness can disrupt an astronaut's sleep pattern. Not surprisingly, as-

tronauts regularly rely upon sleeping pills to help them deal with the noise, motion sickness and other uncomfortable realities of sleeping in zero gravity. A 10-year study on astronaut sleep habits found that 75 percent used sleeping pills.

It is important that sleeping quarters are well ventilated. Otherwise, astronauts can wake up deprived of oxygen and gasping for air, because a bubble of their own exhaled carbon dioxide has formed around their heads.

There are 16 sunsets and sunrises every 24 hours on the ISS, so it is not easy to know when it is time to sleep. Astronauts work and sleep according to a daily time plan. They are usually scheduled for eight hours of sleep at the end of each mission day. They may wear eyeshades or pull down shutters over the windows to keep out the sunlight while they are sleeping.

Webography https://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/stem -on-station/ditl_sleeping/ Corlan Alex Romania

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Solar Activity cycles 23th and 24th Study Domínguez-Bello M.J.1 1

IES Magallanes, Granadilla de Abona, Tenerife.

Abstract

The sunspots are darker photosphere areas due to its lower temperature (about 2000° C lower) and are sun magnetic activity tracers. It has been determined that the sun has activity cycles (1), and nowadays is the 24th one, this study has compared the hemispheric sun activity of the 23th and actual 24th solar cycle. The actual cycle shows low activity compared to the 23th one and specially low in the northern hemisphere. On the other hand it has been study the days without sunspots on the same period of time and it was stablished that can be a way to determine the maximum activity time period in a cycle.

Introduction Sunspots are regions in the Sun’s photosphere where intense magnetic fields cause the temperature and radiation to be less than in the surrounding, hotter and brighter photosphere gases. A single sunspot consist of one or more dark cores, called umbrae, often surrounded by a less dark area called penumbra. In the umbrae, very intense, longitudinally oriented magnetic fields cause the photospheric gases to become very cool, and thus dark compared to overall photosphere.

Sunspots have been the subject of interest to astronomers and astrophysicists for many years: sunspot sightings were first recorded in China as far back as 165 BC; Galileo made some of the first detailed hand-drawings of sunspots in 1610 using a primitive telescope. With the advent of more sophisticated telescopes and photographic devices, knowledge about sunspots and their relationship to other solar phenomena has increased. Nowadays, it is known that sunspots do not appear to be randomly scattered over the Sun’s surface but are confined to a specific band. Sunspots are also recognized to have their own life-cycle. They are born and die, grow and shrink in size, form groups and formations, and move across the Sun’s surface throughout their lifetime. (2) Sunspot observation, analysis and classification form an important part in furthering knowledge about the Sun, the solar weather and its effect on earth. (3) Sunspots have a tendency to appear in magnetically bipolar groups. In each group there are normally two major spots, oriented approximately east-west, called the leading, preceding or western, and the following or eastern spot. The leading spot is usually larger in size and has stronger magnetic field strength. It is first to form, first to develop penumbra, and last to dissipate. Also the leading spot is often located slightly closer to the equator than the following spot. Once a sunspot has reached its maximum longitudinal extent, it usually stabilizes or starts to decay as the magnetic field weakens. Sunspots within a region will sometimes move relative to each other (e.g. converge or revolve about each other) or the major spot may rotate about an axis.

The number of spots in a sunspot group is the number of umbrae (dark cores) visible.

Sunspots appear on the solar disk as individual spots or as a group of spots. Sunspot groups can have an infinite variety of formations and sizes, ranging from small solo spots to giant groups of spots with complex structure.

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Sun Activity In 1843, the German naturalist Heinrich Schwabe discovered that the spots appeared to have an about 10years cycle, which was confirmed in 1855 by Rudolph Wolf who found an 11 years periodicity, known as "11year solar cycle".

In 1859 the english naturalist Richard Carrington discovered that the Sun had a differential rotation, that is, it rotates faster in Equator than at the poles. He also found that the average latitude of spots varies with time.

At the beginning of the activity cycle spots appear near the latitudes of 30°, as the cycle progresses, being formed closer to Ecuador, being located at the maximum near 10° latitude. In fact, the solar cycle is twice as long, about 22 years, since it takes place every 11 years a solar magnetic poles inversion and 22 years is the time it takes for the Sun to return to its original configuration. All cycles are not the same, but vary its duration and intensity.

The shorter single cycle registration was 7 years and the longest 17. There have also been cycle exceptions, as the detected by E.W. Maunder in 1893, which showed that for 70 years, between 1645 and 1715 sunspots virtually disappeared (known as "Maunder minimum" in his honor). Studies point to the existence of other minimum-like Maunder in more ancient times. Geological research shows that millions years ago 11-year solar cycle existed, so in a long time scale cycle 11-year solar cycle is a permanent solar phenomenon, although there are many indications that its intensity can vary widely.

Solar activity cycles are numbered since 1761 maximum. Currently (2016) we are at Nº 24 cycle,

The Wolf Number In 1848 the swiss astronomer Rudolf Wolf introduced a solar activity registration method from the counting of visible sunspots numbers, known as Wolf or Zürich index number (or worldwide as International Sunspot Number).

Although qualitative, Wolf himself extended it to the first telescopic Galileo observations and has been continuously maintained until today, and there are solar activity currently records over the last 400 years.

The Wolf number (W or R) is obtained from the following expression: W = K (10 G + f)

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K is a statistical cor r ection factor applied by the inter national center that coor dinates and r educes the observations, so to directly obtain the W value is K = 1.

G r epr esents the number of visible gr oups. An isolated por e counts as focus and as a gr oup. f is the total number of foci of all sunspots as explained above.

The minimal activity or Wolf number is 0 (the solar surface should be completely clean), moving then to 11 for a single group on the solar disk with a single focus would be G = 1, f = 1, therefore, W = 11. From 11 you can follow the consecutive values of natural numbers (12, 13, 14,...). We can roughly calculate the individual sunspots number on the solar surface if we divide the index or Wolf sunspot number by 15.

Objective The aim of this work is the study of the total wolf number, wolf number per hemisphere, and days without spots based on data provided by the database WDC-SILSO (Sunspots Index and Long-term Solar Observations) for the 23rd and the current 24th sun period(4).

Procedures Using the WDC-SILSO, Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussels data we have the data on Table 1 summarizing the average Wolf Number per month, total and per hemisphere for the time period studied, one standard deviation was used to determine if the differences are significant.

Results and Discussion On the Fig. 1, we can see the Sun activity per hemisphere for the 2 cycles, the activity in the maximum of each cycle is not the same, and cycle 23th has had a larger maximum than the 24th.

Studying the 23th cycle the maximum is reached in 4 years meanwhile the subsequent minimum in 7 years.

We can see also, that from the beginning to the maximum the northern hemisphere has had a slightly higher activity, whereas from the peak to the cycle end has been the most active southern hemisphere, however, though the differences are not statistically significant.

Fig. 1 On the other hand, the cycle 24th has started with the slightly highest northern hemisphere activity, but to get the activity peak has remained constant or has been lower (year 2011-2015) while the southern hemisphere activity surpassed the northern hemisphere, moreover the difference is statistically significant. The Fig. 2 shows the comparative time (years) vs. Wolf Number graphics (Total, Northern and Southern Hemisphere). On the 23 th solar cycle, during the activity peak the Wolf Number for both hemispheres is similar, but once reach the maximum, the northern hemisphere gets the minimum almost 2 years before than the southern hemisphere.

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Fig. 2

The Fig. 3 shows the comparative activity per hemisphere in red if the northern hemisphere is the most active or in blue if the southern is the most active one. In this figure it can be seen that after the maximum activity during the 23th solar cycle until the minimum, the southern hemisphere is more active, then, once the 24th cycle begins (January 2008(5)) is the northern one the most active, but from 2011 (3 years after the beginning of the cycle) its activity kept constant or slightly lower.

Fig. 3 On the contrary the southern hemisphere increased its activity until the maximum in the first months of 2013.

As can be seen in Fig. 2 upper part the 24th cycle total Wolf Number maximum is not well defined, one maximum in 2011 and other in 2013 and lower than the 23th maximum.

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Fig. 4 In the Fig. 4 is represented the days without sunspots. As can be seen the maximum in the graphic has coincidence with the minimum Wolf number periods in both cycles. It can be used to determine the minimum activity, but the study must be extended to more cycles to stablish this as a fact.

Conclusion The 23th solar cycle seems to have less activity than the 24th one maybe due to the low northern hemisphere activity it means a weak polar magnetic field compared to the previous cycle (6).

The Days without spots study can be a way to determine the maximum activity time period in a solar cycle, but is necessary a more extensive study.

Bibliography (1) NASA Earth Observatory Glossary: “Solar Cycle”. http://web.archive.org/web/20080411085939/http://eobglossary.gsfc.nasa.gov/Library/glossary.php3? mode=alpha&seg=s (2) Nguyen, T. Learning Sunspoot Classification, Fundamenta Informaticae XX, 1-15; 2006.

(3) Phillps K. Guide to the Sun. Cambridge University Press. 1992.

(4) http://sidc.oma.be/silso/datafiles (5) http://ciencia.nasa.gov/science-at-nasa/2008/10jan_solarcycle24/ (6) Svalgaard, Leif. "Sunspot cycle 24: Smallest cycle in 100 years?". GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 32, L01104, doi:10.1029/2004GL021664, 2005.