Submission + - Physicists say cosmic rays effect length of day (physicscentral.com)
Flash Modin writes: If your Monday is dragging on too long, you might try blaming it on cosmic rays. In a paper published Friday by the journal Geophysical Research Letters, geophysicists from Paris and Moscow propose that the high energy protons and nuclei might have a surprising influence on Earth's length of day. The team claims that a previously noticed relationship between fluctuations in the length of day and the 11-year solar-cycle are actually caused by cosmic rays.The round-about argument is that cosmic rays effect cloud cover, which then changes the atmosphere's energy budget and has a significant enough effect on wind speeds to change the Earth's angular momentum. The net effect is only a few tenths of a millisecond, but the physicists claim the more important implication is in the overall debate over whether cosmic rays could be a cause of climate change by influencing cloud formation.