Schwabe solar cycle
Ciclo solar de Schwabe
- Date
- 1843 · confidence high
- Place
- Dessau, Germany
- Credited to
- Heinrich Schwabe
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What was discovered
After seventeen years of daily solar observation from his private observatory, apothecary and amateur astronomer Heinrich Schwabe found that the number of sunspots rises and falls with a period of about eleven years.
The Dane Christian Horrebow had already suspected a periodicity in sunspots between 1761 and 1776 from Copenhagen, but never published a firm conclusion; credit for the discovery goes to Schwabe. Rudolf Wolf formalized the numbering of solar cycles in 1852, dating the first cycle's start to 1755.
What it led to
- The Wolf number and standardized sunspot counting (1852)
- Study of solar activity and its effect on Earth's climate and communications
- Discovery of the 22-year magnetic (Hale) cycle