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The sun can be in a very busy time. Based on the new predictions, the next high in their activity cycles could be one of the strongest we’ve seen.
This is in direct contradiction to the official NASA and NOAA solar weather forecast, but if confirmed, it could confirm a theory about cycles of solar activity that scientists have been working on for years.
“Scientists have struggled to predict both the length and 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 is correct, we will have evidence that our framework for understanding the Sun’s internal magnetic machine is on the right track.”
The Sun’s activity levels are actually quite variable and its activity cycles are tied to its magnetic field.
Every 11 years, the solar poles change places; the south becomes north and the north becomes south. It is not clear what drives these cycles, but we know that the poles change when the magnetic field is at its weakest.
Because the Sun’s magnetic field controls its activity (sunspots (temporary regions of strong magnetic fields), solar flares, and coronal mass ejections (produced by magnetic field lines breaking and reconnecting), this stage of the cycle becomes manifested as a period of minimal activity, called the solar minimum.
Once the poles have shifted, the magnetic field strengthens and solar activity rises to a solar maximum before decreasing for the next polar shift.
We typically keep track of solar minima by carefully monitoring solar activity and exercising after one has occurred. By this metric, the most recent solar minimum occurred in December 2019. We are now in the 25th solar cycle since the records began, heading toward a solar maximum.
According to NASA and NOAA, this is expected to be a silent maximum, with a sunspot peak of around 115 sunspots in July 2025. This is quite similar to solar cycle 24, which had a sunspot peak of 114.
But McIntosh and his colleagues believe differently. In 2014, he and his colleagues published a paper describing their observations of the Sun over a 22-year cycle.
This has long been considered the complete solar cycle, when the poles return to their initial positions, but McIntosh noticed something interesting. Over the course of about 20 years, flashes of extreme ultraviolet light called coronal bright spots appear to move from the poles toward the equator, meeting in the middle.
The movement of these bright spots in the mid-latitudes appears to coincide with the activity of sunspots.
(Scott McIntosh / NCAR)
These bright spots, McIntosh believes, are linked to bands of magnetic fields that surround the Sun and propagate from the poles to the equator about every 11 years.
Because they have opposite polarity, when they meet in the middle, they cancel each other out, what the researchers call a “terminator.” These termination events mark the end of one solar magnetic cycle and the beginning of the next.
But they don’t always take exactly the same amount of time. Sometimes these bands slow down as they reach mid-latitudes, which means that the time between termination events varies. And the team noted that there is a correlation between the amount of time between terminators and the intensity of the next solar maximum.
“When we look back over the 270-year observational record of termination events, we see that the longer the time between terminations, the weaker the next cycle,” said astronomer Bob Leamon of the University of Maryland in the county. from Baltimore.
“And conversely, the shorter the time between terminators, the stronger the next solar cycle.”
The longest recorded cycle according to time between terminators is solar cycle 4, which lasted more than 15 years. It was followed by the famous Dalton minimum, a peak of just 82 sunspots in solar cycle 5, lasting almost 14 years, and 81 sunspots in solar cycle 6.
But the shortest solar cycles, those of less than 11 years, are followed by peaks with peaks well above 200 sunspots.
Solar Cycle 23, according to the McIntosh team’s metric, was quite long. It lasted almost 13 years. And solar cycle 24 was much quieter than the cycles that preceded it. But it was also very short, below the 10-year mark. If the team’s analyzes are to the point, we should have a lot of sunspots by the mid-2020s.
There’s only one way to find out: we have to wait and see. But McIntosh and his team trust their interpretation of the Sun’s activity. And, if they’re right, that will give us a whole new set of tools 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 predicts, would be a total departure from everything the data has shown us thus far.”
The research has been published in Solar physics.
