Our Sun Has Entered a New Cycle, And It Could Be One of The Strongest Ever Recorded

[Seldom Bucket]

The Sun may be in for a very busy time. According to new predictions, the next maximum in its activity cycles could be the one of the strongest we've seen.

This is in direct contradiction to the official solar weather forecast from NASA and the NOAA, but if it bears out, it could confirm a theory about solar activity cycles that scientists have been working on for years.


"Scientists have struggled to predict both the length and the strength of sunspot cycles because we lack a fundamental understanding of the mechanism that drives the cycle," said solar physicist Scott McIntosh of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research.

"If our forecast proves correct, we will have evidence that our framework for understanding the Sun's internal magnetic machine is on the right path."

The Sun's activity levels are actually quite variable, and its activity cycles are bound up with its magnetic field.

Our Sun Has Entered a New Cycle, And It Could Be One of The Strongest Ever Recorded

The Sun may be in for a very busy time. According to new predictions, the next maximum in its activity cycles could be one of the strongest we've seen.

www.sciencealert.com

 

[Johnatan56]

The longest cycle on record based on time between terminators is Solar Cycle 4, which lasted over 15 years. It was followed by the famous Dalton minimum - a peak of just 82 sunspots in Solar Cycle 5, which lasted nearly 14 years, and 81 sunspots in Solar Cycle 6.

But shorter solar cycles - those that are less than 11 years - are followed by maxima with peaks well above 200 sunspots.

Solar Cycle 23, according to McIntosh's team's metric, was pretty long. It lasted nearly 13 years. And Solar Cycle 24 was much quieter than the cycles that preceded it. But it was also really short, coming in under the 10-year mark. If the team's analyses are in point, we should be in for a lot of sunspots by the mid-2020s.

Not sure how this supports his hypothesis since that's a case of 2 examples, so this is quite an "open" hypothesis, can't really prove or disprove yet.

The entire community seems to be against his hypothesis as well:

There's only one way to find out - we have to wait and see. But McIntosh and his team are confident in their interpretation of the Sun's activity. And, if they're right, that will give us a whole new toolset for understanding how the Sun works.

"Once you identify the terminators in the historical records, the pattern becomes obvious," McIntosh said.

"A weak Sunspot Cycle 25, as the community is predicting, would be a complete departure from everything that the data has shown us up to this point."

But he's averaging it from two examples, so he's taking the most two recent pattern as continuing to say the next thing will be so, without proving the base pattern continues.

 

[Papa Smurf]

Freaky
I can watch this all afternoon drinking my beers