NASA spots piping hot batch of new sunspots

NY Post ^ | June 2, 2020 | | Mike Wehner

[BenLurkin]

Just a couple of days ago, NASA helped spot a new batch of sunspots and the flares arcing above them. In a new blog post, NASA explains that the flares weren’t particularly powerful and didn’t register with NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center, but NASA’s own hardware was able to detect them. The space agency suggests that the sunspots and flares could be an indication that the star is becoming more active yet again.

The Sun typically runs on cycles that last around 11 years on average. During times of high activity, called the solar maximum, sunspots and flares are frequent. It’s during these times that Earth is at the greatest risk of being impacted by a coronal mass ejection, which is what happens when the Sun spews charged particles out into space at incredibly high speeds. If Earth is in the wrong place at the wrong time, that kind of space weather can hinder communications and cause problems with orbiting spacecraft.

The solar minimum, by contrast, is a period of time when the Sun is fairly quiet. Researchers believe we’re in the midst of a solar minimum right now, so the sighting of new sunspots and flares might seem odd, but as Spaceweather reports, the newly-identified features disappeared so rapidly that observers didn’t even have time to catalog them, suggesting the solar minimum is still in full swing.

However, the fact that the sunspots popped up at all suggests that we may be slowly leaving the solar minimum and returning to a period of more intense solar activity. Calculating the end of a solar minimum is actually a bit more tricky than you might assume.

[TigersEye]

Wow!

Well, here’s hoping you dream of fireflies, mulberries and Alice Cooper. :)

[Salamander]

Well, there’s a real trifecta of weirdness.

:D

[higgmeister]

In the late seventies I used to keep a close eye on sunspot activity.   Radio Station WWV, Coordinated Universal Time, would broadcast sunspot activity alerts.   I was one of the guys in the USAF who worked rotating shifts keeping the global telecommunications system up and running and back then it was HF radio shots, very susceptible to atmospheric disturbances due to sunspot activity.