The Earth is Dimming, Here’s the Researchers’ Explanation

Suara.com – For researcher have the latest findings, Earth not as bright as it used to be and has been dimming at a noticeable pace in recent years.

Using a telescope, researchers from the Big Bear Solar Observatory have been taking measurements every night for the past 20 years, to study solar cycle and cloud cover.

According to NASA, they do this by measuring “Earth glow,” which occurs when “the dark face of the Moon captures Earth’s reflected light and returns that light.”

The amount of ground light will vary from night to night and season to season.

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Earthshine is a phenomenon that occurs when light from the Sun is reflected from Earth to the dark side of the Moon.

The moon then reflects some of that light back to Earth.

People on Earth see this as a dim view of the dark side of the Moon.

The best time to see this happen in the northern hemisphere is on the days around the new moon during the spring months.

“You see a quarter of the Moon. You can see the entire Moon because three quarters of it is illuminated in this ghostly light,” said Philip Goode, a researcher at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and lead author of the new study.

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After 20 years of measuring ‘ghost light’, they found it fading.

“The sun’s rays are reflected off the earth, and that’s what gets dimmer,” Goode said.

In fact, the Earth now reflects about half a watt less light per square meter than it did 20 years ago, equivalent to a 0.5 percent decrease in the Earth’s reflection.

Earth reflects about 30 percent of the sunlight that shines on it.

For the first 17 years, the data looked more or less the same, to the point where the researchers nearly dropped the rest of the study.

“We were a bit reluctant to do the last three years of data because it looked the same for 17 years, but finally we decided to do it because we promised ourselves 20 years of data let’s do this, and we got the unexpected,” Good said.

The last three years of their research shows that ground light has fallen dramatically. So much so, they think their data is flawed.

“When we analyzed the data for the last three years, it looked different,” Goode said CNN, Monday (11/10/2021).

“The bounce has dropped markedly. So we thought we were doing something wrong. So we repeated it a few times and it turned out to be true.”

They noticed the data was uncorrelated with the sun’s brightness varying due to its solar cycle, meaning it must be something else.

What they noticed was a decrease in cloud cover. Sunlight is reflected from the top of the clouds and reflected back into space.

When there is a decrease in cloud cover, more sunlight is allowed in.

“Earth is getting hotter because less reflected light is getting, so more sunlight enters, in the visible spectrum,” Goode said.

The largest decrease in cloud cover occurred on the west coasts of North and South America, the same region where sea surface temperatures are rising due to a reversal of climatic conditions called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).

“Off the west coast of America, lowland clouds are burning out and more Sunlight is coming in, so as we can see, the Earth’s reflection has gone down,” Goode said.

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