Unusually Low Sun Activity Expected to Give Way to Maximum And Solar Storms This Year

The 11-year cycle of solar activity was supposed to be at a maximum in these months, but our sun is instead very quiet until now, apart from the occasional CME shot towards Earth, with only light effects for the last two this week and last month. But scientists speculate that this will change in a matter of months, since the solar cycle is likely twin-peaked so that we will see an increase of solar activity as the year goes on.

The first peak was in 2011 when the sun was quite active, unleashing numerous flares and and eruptions towards the end of that year, but has become surprisingly inactive since them, according to a video by Science@NASA.

Dean Pesnell, a solar physicist of the Goddard Space Flight Center, said in the NASA video that "this is solar maximum, but it looks different than what we expected because it is double peaked."

This is in response to the observation that sunspot numbers are well below the numbers seen in 2011, prompting some to wonder if our understanding of the Sun is inaccurate and that the sun cycle is not at the predicted maximum.

Pesnell believes that the reduced solar activity is the result of a small trough at the top of the peak and that solar activity will re-ignite as the year moves onward.

The last solar maxima in 1989 and 2011 had two peaks, Pesnell notes, and what we are seeing at this time is a trough in a similar twin-peaked cycle. The troughs of the last two cycles lasted about two years, which is consistent with the trough the sun in now experiencing. Pesnell is confident the sun will re-ignite as the year goes on and perhaps be in a maximum of solar activity through the year 2014.

For a start, our star shot solar particles in a high-speed coronal mass ejection towards Earth at about 1500 kilometers per second last weekend, causing a mild geomagnetic storm that produced some spectacular Northern Lights.