The Sun’s activity is escalating far beyond scientist’s predictions, Nasa has warned, resulting in more solar storms, flares and space weather events.
Solar activity typically follows an 11 year cycle, with the cycle’s strength steadily decreasing between the 1980s and 2008.
Scientists had expected this trend to continue with historically low activity for the latest cycle, however a new study from the US space agency has shown the Sun to be increasingly active since 2008.
“All signs were pointing to the Sun going into a prolonged phase of low activity,” said Jamie Jasinski of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California, who led the study.
“So it was a surprise to see that trend reversed. The Sun is slowly waking up.”
The findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters in a study titled “The Sun reversed its decades-long weakening trend in 2008”.
One of the biggest impacts of increased solar activity on Earth is disruption to communication systems, with coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and solar flares causing radio blackouts, damage to satellites, GPS errors, and even power grid failures.
Charged particles emitted by the Sun during these solar events can also disturb the Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field to produce strong auroras in the form of the Northern Lights and Southern Lights.
Astronomers have been tracking solar activity since the 1600s, with one of the longest anomalous periods taking place between 1790 and 1830, when the Sun went quiet.
“We don’t really know why the Sun went through a 40-year minimum starting in 1790,” Dr Jasinski said.
“The longer-term trends are a lot less predictable and are something we don’t completely understand yet.”
Next week, Nasa plans to launch two new missions – the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory and Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe – to further space weather research and observations.
The findings will be used to inform how space weather events could affect spacecraft and astronauts’ safety ahead of the Artemis campaign, which aims to return humans to the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years.
