ONE ASPECT OF THE SPECIFIC BIOACTIVE OR Z-RADIATION* OF THE SUN A thorough study of the effects on organisms of certain powerful en vironmental factors should now be conducted. For this, all necessary for ces and resources of our scientific wealth should be converged because, as will be shown, these might become one of the most acute problems in the complex practice of therapeutics and prophylaxis.
Until thirty or forty years ago, biologists used the term "outer environ ment" mainly to designate the meteorological and geophysical factors that may in some way act on the organism and elicit certain reactions. I. P. Pavlov included in the complex of outer environmental factors a large number of stimuli surrounding man and acting on his senses and central nervous system. Modern science has greatly expanded the concept of outer environment to include interplanetary space, from which electromagnetic waves of various wavelengths and streams of electrically charged particles reach us. Thus, the term outer environment implies the entire surrounding world with its great diversity of stimuli.
As a result of the remarkable progress made in the fields of physics and biological sciences we have come close to solving several cardinal problems concerning the effects of radiations on the human organism and, particularly, of certain specific active radiations of the central body of our planetary system. Although the Sun is about 149 million kilometers from the Earth, it is "a stone's throw away," since its diameter is approximately 1.39 million kilometers, and hence the distance between the Sun and Earth is only about 107 Sun diameters.
The most easily observed features on the Suns surface are the sun spots. They had been clearly described at the beginning of the 17th century. Since the mid-19th century they have become an "index" of the intensity of solar activity, and the subject of thorough heliophysical studies. A voluminous body of physical data is now available in the literature dealing with the nature of suu spots and of accompanying phenomena such as faculae, filaments, flares, bursts, prominences, etc.
Sunspots represent areas of the photosphere associated with a powerful magnetic field. They are caused by convection in the solar nucleus trans mitted by magnetohydrodynamic waves to its surface as a result of thermonuclear reactions. Sunspot groups extend over vast areas; in 1947 a group was found to occupy an area of 10 billion These solar formations could instantaneously swallow dozens of terrestrial globes. No
less striking are the prominences (which sometimes rise to hundreds of thousands of kilometers above the photosphere at velocities of up to 700km/sec and partially disappear in interplanetary space), as well as the exceptionally bright, dazzling transient flares which suddenly appear and which emit radiations of extreme intensity in the shortwave ultraviolet region. Heliophysical studies have established a striking regularity in the occurrence of these tremendous solar phenomena. The basic cycle of solar activity takes approximately 11 years, with certain fluctuations in both directions. This infers that the number and size of the spots visible on the Sun's surface are comparatively small for a period of two or three years, followed by a steady increase in the number and dimensions of the spots and their groups, until they finally reach a maximum size and frequency in the period of maximum solar activity. The synodic period of the rotation of the Sun is 27 days. Consequently a sunspot or any disturbed area is visible for a period of 13.5 days, whereupon it passes to the other side of the Sun for the same period. It takes about a week for a sunspot to enter the plane of the central solar meridian from the solar limb.
When sunspots, bursts, prominences, chromospheric flares, etc. pass through the plane of the central solar meridian, they generate a series of extreme perturbations in the Earth's crust and atmosphere such as magnetic storms, polar auroras, fluctuations in the gradient of the electric potential in the atmosphere, interferences with wire and wireless communication, and many other anomalies in the Earth's atmosphere, hydrosphere, bio sphere, and lithosphere. The functional correlation of many biological and solar phenomena can be regarded as firmly established. The extent of influence of this bond and the correlation coefficients of the given pheno mena increase progressively with the accumulation and accuracy of helio physical, geophysical, and biological observations. In addition to the basic 11-year solar activity cycle, 27-day perturbation periods were observed, which are related to the Sun's rotation around its axis, i, e., to the shifting of the active sites on the Sun with respect to the Earth. There are also other, less clearly defined cycles /80/.