Teemu Hiltula studies the dance of the bashful ballerina, pondering same from his base at the Space Physics Group at the University of Oulu, in Finland. Other scholars of the bashful ballerina speak knowingly of Hitula’s two ballerina studies:
“The Dance of the Bashful Ballerina in 1926-2004,” T. Hiltula and K. Mursula, Geophysical Research Abstracts, vol. 7, 2005.
We have recently shown using satellite observations of the heliospheric magnetic field (HMF) that the heliospheric current sheet (HCS) is shifted or coned southward for a few years close to the solar activity minima. This is a regular pattern (also called the bashful ballerina) during the last 40 years of direct HMF observations.
and
“Long Dance of the Bashful Ballerina,” Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 33, 2006.
In this letter we extend our earlier analysis of the north-south asymmetry of the heliospheric current sheet… [The] HCS has been southward shifted; that is, the solar ballerina has been bashful at least during the last 80 years.
(Thanks to investigator Tom Gill for bringing this to our attention.)