Originally posted by crt
Mars is melting too

It is not yet clear, though, if the evidence of a single year's change represents a trend.

And Jupiter is being affected

This growth signals a temperature increase in that region, she said.

Is the sun getting hotter?

Hotter sun to blame

Dr Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research, said: "The Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures.

www.ens-newswire.com...

But Professor Sami Solanki, solar physicist and director at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, is not convinced that the increased activity of the Sun is responsible for global warming.

He says that based on his team's research, the Sun can be responsible for, at most, only a small part of the warming over the last 20 to 30 years.

...

However, they said, "since about 1980, while the total solar radiation, its ultraviolet component, and the cosmic ray intensity all exhibit the 11-year solar periodicity, there has otherwise been no significant increase in their values. In contrast, the Earth has warmed up considerably within this time period. This means that the Sun is not the cause of the present global warming."

Originally posted by crt
Mars is melting too

And Jupiter is being affected

It seems this warming phenomina is solar system wide, not just the earth. So unless there are hidden factories on Mars we don't know about, it seems it is more the sun than green house gases that are causing climate change.

Is the sun getting hotter?

Hotter sun to blame

Ulysses sees Galactic Dust on the rise
01 Aug 2003

Since early 1992 Ulysses has been monitoring the stream of stardust flowing through our Solar System. The stardust is embedded in the local galactic cloud through which the Sun is moving at a speed of 26 kilometres every second. As a result of this relative motion, a single dust grain takes twenty years to traverse the Solar System. Observations by the DUST experiment on board Ulysses have shown that the stream of stardust is highly affected by the Sun's magnetic field.

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The reason for the weakening of the Sun's magnetic shield is the increased solar activity, which leads to a highly disordered field configuration. In the mid-1990s, during the last solar minimum, the Sun's magnetic field resembled a dipole field with well-defined magnetic poles (North positive, South negative), very much like the Earth. Unlike Earth, however, the Sun reverses its magnetic polarity every 11 years. The reversal always occurs during solar maximum. That's when the magnetic field is highly disordered, allowing more interstellar dust to enter the Solar System. It is interesting to note that in the reversed configuration after the recent solar maximum (North negative, South positive), the interstellar dust is even channelled more efficiently towards the inner Solar System. So we can expect even more interstellar dust from 2005 onwards, once the changes become fully effective.

Threefold increase

The number of interstellar dust grains increased from four per day, per meter in 1997 to 12 per day in 2000, Landgraf said. The results were announced earlier this month. He expects the rate to stay constant until 2005, and then increase by another factor of 3 prior to 2013.

The potential effects are not well known, according to Landgraf and his colleagues at the Max-Planck-Institute.