Note: I wrote this on my earlier blog hosted as https://parallelspirals.blogspot.com. I recovered the text from the WayBack Machine. This post appeared on March 03, 2011 as per the permalink. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.
A project funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Department of Science and Technology (DST) of the Government of India has claimed to have found the reason for the long solar minimum experienced during the last solar cycle. A team led by Indian Dibyendu Nandy of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Kolkata which included Andrés Muñoz-Jaramillo of Montana State University and Petrus C. H. Martens of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics.
The results will be presented in Nature magazine today. Nandy has made this webpage about the discovery which to me is incomprehensible. My friend Srinivas Laxman wrote this article in today’s Times of India which fares a bit better for comprehension sake. For me the best article on the discovery was by Dr. Tony Philips writing for NASA Science News.
NASA held a media tele-conference on the topic and hence this was widely covered by the press in the US. There seems to be little to no press coverage of the topic in India besides the one written up by Srinivas Laxman.
Parallel Spirals 