Sunspots change in number depending on how much magnetic activity the solar dynamo generates. But there's not total chaos: These changes occur in a cycle, which lasts about 11 years on average. The sun also experiences extended ...
In 1859, the Carrington Event, the most intense geomagnetic storm in recorded history, created spectacular auroral displays around the globe, illuminating the night skies so brightly that birds began singing and laborers ...
The 2015–2018 summer droughts have been exceptional in large parts of Western and Central Europe over the last 400 years, in terms of the magnitude of drought conditions. This indicates an influence of man-made global warming. ...
The number of sunspots on our sun typically ebbs and flows in a predictable 11-year cycle, but one unusual 70-year period when sunspots were incredibly rare has mystified scientists for 300 years. Now, a nearby sun-like star ...
Middle-aged stars can experience their own kind of midlife crisis, experiencing dramatic breaks in their activity and rotation rates at about the same age as our Sun, according to new research published today in Monthly Notices ...
Solar physicists around the world have long been searching for satisfactory explanations for the sun's many cyclical, overlapping activity fluctuations. In addition to the most famous, approximately 11-year "Schwabe cycle", ...
One of the fundamental questions for climate scientists is the extent to which solar output may vary in the future. The sun's all-encompassing effect on Earth's atmosphere means that even slight changes in irradiance can ...
For 400 years people have tracked sunspots, the dark patches that appear for weeks at a time on the sun's surface. They have observed but been unable to explain why the number of spots peaks every 11 years.
One of the big questions in solar physics is why the sun's activity follows a regular cycle of 11 years. Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), an independent German research institute, now present ...
Scientists charged with predicting the sun's activity for the next 11-year solar cycle say that it's likely to be weak, much like the current one. The current solar cycle, Cycle 24, is declining and predicted to reach solar ...
