THE SUNSPOT count is higher than official agencies originally thought, fueling concerns over upcoming extreme solar activity.
The number of sunspots on our Sun has surpassed predictions made by Nasa, NOAA, and the International Space Environmental Service (ISES).
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Sunspots refer to visible dark areas in the Sun’s photosphere as a result of “intense magnetic flux pushing up from further within the solar interior,” the NOAA explained.
Scientists use the known sunspot count to assess our Sun’s solar activity in 11-year cycles.
Each cycle consists of peaks and troughs known as ‘solar maximum’ and ‘solar minimum,’ respectively.
The Sun’s current cycle of solar activity should be mild, however, new data shows that it has been more prominent than experts knew since September 2020.
This could mean that the Sun is gearing up for an “unusually strong” activity cycle, according to Science Alert.
That’s because the strong magnetic fields that cause sunspots also host and fuel solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs).
A ‘solar flare’ is a term used by astronomers to describe eruptions of electromagnetic radiation that happen in the Sun’s atmosphere.
This intense burst of radiation causes a bright solar flash that may be visible for minutes or even hours on Earth.
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CMEs, which often occur at the same time as a solar flare, happen when accelerated charged particles (mainly electrons) collide with the plasma medium.
This collision then pushes matter away from the Sun’s atmosphere and out into space.
The higher the sunspot count, the more likely it is that CMEs and solar storms will affect Earth.
While solar flares cannot travel far enough to hurt humans here on Earth, the electromagnetic radiation and energetic particles can “temporarily alter the upper atmosphere creating disruptions with signal transmission from, say, a GPS satellite,” Nasa explained.
Similarly, a CME could “induce electric fluctuations at ground level that could blow out transformers in power grids,” the space agency added.
In addition to technology blackouts and power grid malfunctions, the two solar events may also cause spectacular auroras.
As our most recent solar minimum took place in December 2019, we’re currently headed for a solar maximum sometime around July 2025.
At present, the Sun has 52 sunspots, but as we’re still a few years away from solar maximum this number may grow, according to Space Weather Live.
Still, monitoring solar cycles is a tricky business, and experts don’t have it down to an exact science.
“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,” solar physicist Scott McIntosh of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research said in 2020, per Science Alert.
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