🎵Sunspot, baby.🎶
Posted on 05/30/2026 10:51:02 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The Sun runs on an 11-year cycle of rising and falling activity, tracked mainly by counting sunspots – the dark patches scattered across its surface.
Solar Cycle 25, the current cycle, was forecast as mild, and the sunspot count agreed.
But those counts read only the surface. A global network of six telescopes has listened to the Sun’s interior for nearly 40 years, and what it is now telling researchers is not what the surface suggested at all.
Listening inside the Sun Scientists have a name for eavesdropping on those sound waves: helioseismology.
The waves are trapped inside the Sun, and as its magnetic activity climbs, the pitch of that ringing edges upward, then settles back as things calm down.
Professor Bill Chaplin of the University of Birmingham led an international team that put almost 40 years of this listening to work.
The team;s recordings come from six telescopes spread around the world, running from 1987 to 2025.
Those instruments form a network known as BiSON, and together they have caught four full turns of the solar cycle. Each rise and fall of the Sun’s activity marks the pitch of that ringing.
What the surface shows The usual way to gauge the Sun leans on what we can see directly. Counting sunspots – the dark, cooler patches where magnetic fields bunch up – is the oldest method, joined by readings of the Sun’s radio output.
Astronomers have kept that sunspot count for centuries, and it has long been the yardstick for how stormy our star is. By it, the current cycle, the 25th on record, came in mild.
At its peak, this cycle showed about a quarter fewer sunspots than the strong one of the late 1980s and early 1990s. By the surface tally, the Sun had simply gone soft.
Listening cycle to cycle
To read depth, the team sorted the ringing into low, middle, and high tones. The lowest notes travel deepest before turning back, while the highest ones sense only the thin layers just beneath the surface.
The low notes had already told a strange story. Around the mid-2000s, they stopped tracking sunspot counts the way they had before, something Chaplin’s group had flagged in earlier work. That disconnect is still there.
On its own, that oddity in the deep notes would be a footnote. Not this time.
The real surprise came from the opposite end of the scale, the highest tones, where no one expected much to change.
The high-frequency surprise
Here is what stopped the team. In the high notes, this cycle rings far louder than its mild sunspot count says it should.
By that measure, the Sun sounds every bit as strong as the big cycles of the 1990s.
The contrast is sharp. Going in, forecasters had pegged this as a below-average cycle in their predictions, and by sunspots it stayed fairly tame. The seismic high notes rank it with the heavyweights.
“This is the first such discovery and would have been impossible without the long BiSON observations,” said Chaplin.
No one had seen this pattern before. A clear sign that the Sun is drifting in ways the surface cannot reveal.
Magnetic activity moves upward
Why would the high notes light up while the deeper ones fade? The answer is location. High notes sense only the Sun’s outer skin, within about 600 miles of the surface, while lower notes feel changes far deeper.
Put together, the pattern suggests the action behind each cycle has crept closer to the surface. Decades ago it sat deeper. Now it appears increasingly concentrated in a thin layer near the top.
“This trend cannot be explained simply by weaker magnetic fields,” said Professor Sarbani Basu of Yale University.
Basu reads it as the Sun rearranging where it stores that activity beneath the surface – more than just a fading magnetism.
Predicting solar storms
The Sun’s tantrums are not just pretty auroras. Big eruptions fling charged particles toward Earth, and space weather like that can scramble the systems we lean on, from satellites and radio to GPS and power grids.
Predicting those storms starts with reading how active the Sun is. If sunspot counts undersell the real strength hiding below, warnings built on them could be caught out by a Sun that looks calm but is not.
That gap between what we see and what we hear is the practical payoff of listening underground. The view from the surface, it turns out, can hide as much as it reveals.
What the next cycle may reveal
For the first time, scientists have evidence that the Sun’s magnetic activity is becoming increasingly concentrated in a thin layer near the surface – a shift that decades of sunspot counts failed to reveal.
What this means over the long run is still open. The team wants to keep listening through the coming cycle to learn whether this is a passing phase or a longer rhythm unfolding across many decades.
If it holds, the Sun may be easing into a new mode of behavior, one only the sound waves can hear. And the sharper we read that signal, the better our odds of seeing its storms coming.
The study is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
I was sure it would be Jim Morrison and the Doors doing “Here Comes The Sun”.
When that big ball of fire goes out... You’ll know it about 8 minutes and 20 seconds after it does. ... Don’t worry... You won’t feel a thing.
I think you’re right. I am old and I can’t dance either. 🫤
Something rising up from the sun. Seems biblical better go to church tomorrow
Are you channeling Jeff Bezos last rocket test?
Maybe solar magnetic changes and huge solar flares will at some point curtail our massive data centers from functioning.
AI Overview...
In Chapter 18 of J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield remarks: "I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war, I'm going to sit right the hell on top of it."
I guess this is why Stanley Kubrick always wanted to make a movie based on 'The Catcher in the Rye'.
I read all of those words, but I don’t know what it all means.
What if there are life forms in the sun? Coherent magnetic fields?
If there are life forms in the sun, how could they ever travel outside their environment?
There may be sun-fleas.
We’ve got a bad case of sun-fleas.
That’s a ‘Hail Mary’... Pardon the movie pun.
Flares, atomic bombs, or EMF pulses ain’t hurting my 1970/350/chevy. Besides why would sun creatures come here? If the Yellowstone Caldera goes I’ll be headed there.
See the post. I have a product we can use to get rid of our Sun Fleas.
Instinct. Sun Fleas are a real problem.
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