Quiet sun?

[Guest Keith Woodard]

Good Day,

 

The solar disk is almost absent of sunspot activity. No northern lights for a while I would guess. Is the sun going back to a weaker period of activity. Is this the peak of this solar cycle?

 

 

Cheers,

KWITS

[Vancanneyt Sander]

this is normal during a cycle. The sunspot numbers are not very low but the regions are just not very active. Even in solar maximum you can have periods that are very calm. The lack of flare producing regions is an other thing ;-)

In the graphs of the solar cycle progression we won't see much change in the smoothed curve, but our hoped second peak looks like it might come to an end but we can't know for sure if we are a year further when the smoothed monthly mean numbers are known. Things might change fast to active conditions if a new region would emerge, it can always happen. 

[Guest Keith Woodard]

and is this called solar max?

[Marcel de Bont]

Who knows? This is for sure one of the weakest cycle on record but every solar cycle has it's quiet periods followed by periods of intense activity. It is not unthinkable that the Sun goes quiet for a few months now and then suddenly get's active again. We were for sure in a relatively active period the past 9 months or so.

[Guest Keith Woodard]

My question remains for this solar cycle is, have we passed its peak? Soon we will have nothing to discuss here.

[Marcel de Bont]

We can only guess. Nobody knows. However, even if we have passed solar max we will still get outbursts of activity. We still have years to go before we are nearing solar minimum. :)

[Guest Keith Woodard]

Isn't that what was said last solar cycle?

[Marcel de Bont]

You could say that for every solar cycle. It just is unpredictable. Activity often comes in burst and the strongest activity occurs often during the declining phase of a solar cycle. Just look at the Halloween storms of 2003 for example. Extreme activity 3 years after solar max.

[Guest Keith Woodard]

but again there is thing called trending data and of course history can be our guide as well...

[Marcel de Bont]

That's what I said: history shows that the strongest activity often occurs after solar maximum but that is no guarantee that this solar cycle will also give us extreme activity well after solar max. Nobody knows. :)

[Tim De Blanck]

That's what I said: history shows that the strongest activity often occurs after solar maximum but that is no guarantee that this solar cycle will also give us extreme activity well after solar max. Nobody knows.

And that's why i love spaceweather! It's always surprising.

[Guest Keith Woodard]

That is scary that in the 21st century, no one can predict solar weather. However, you can learn much from history since the middle 1700's since sunspot activity as monitored. The number of sunspots and their size directly determine the intenisty of solar activity. These things are cyclical but many variables are still unknown about our star. With this being said, there should stil be a pattern in the the chaos of confusing and inconsistent data. History does have a way of repeating itself. If we know our past then we should be able to gauge our future.

[Vancanneyt Sander]

sunspots do not tell all the stories, the biggest uncertainty that persist is the inside of the sun, which we can't see . It takes lots of years before light travels from inside tthe sun to the surface and maybe that is the case too with the cycles. We now have more advanced methods and tools and spacecrafts but there is still many many years of research necessary to advance in the knowledge of the sun and how to predict it's activity.

[Guest Keith Woodard]

On June 3rd there was a moderate flare event but that type of radiation did not energize our magnetosphere. As for sunspots and solar weather in general, if you checked back into the history of the Little Ice Age, there almost no sunspots observed on the solar disk during that time. Was this a coincidence?

We can look at stars light-years away and know their exact chemical composition, mass, and density. We know if there are variables or not. We know if there is a close binary sharing its corona. We can even detect subtle changes in their light to find planets. However, we are still left guessing with our G5 star just 93 million miles away.