Our Sun Is Changing

11 Tamuz 5777

SUNSPOTS ARE VANISHING

Today, July 5th, the sun is blank--no sunspots. White light images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory show no dark cores anywhere on the solar disk.

This marks the 44th day in 2017 without sunspots. So many blank suns is a clear sign that Solar Minimum is approaching. The last time the solar cycle shifted in this way, ~10 years ago, the sun plunged into the deepest Solar Minimum in a century. Between 2008 and 2009, sunspots were absent almost all the time; cosmic rays from deep space penetrated the solar system in record numbers; and Earth's upper atmosphere collapsed. We are on the verge of this happening again.

Yesterday, July 4th, at a meeting in the UK, researchers led by Prof. Yvonne Elsworth at the University of Birmingham reported that acoustic waves inside the sun shifted frequencies during the previous Solar Minimum (2008-2009), and those frequency shifts have persisted to the present day. "This lends weight to speculation that a fundamental change in the nature of the [sun's magnetic] dynamo may be in progress," they stated in a paper recently published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. These findings suggest that another deep Solar Minimum could be in the offing. Stay tuned for more blank suns.