![]() When they meet at the equator, they annihilate one another.īelow, right: The top animation shows the total sunspot number (black) and the contributions from the north (red) and south (blue) hemispheres. As they cross the mid-latitudes, the bright points coincide with the emergence of sunspot activity.īelow, left: Oppositely charged magnetic bands, represented in red and blue, march toward the equator over a 22-year period. These bright points can be seen marching from the Sun’s high latitudes to the equator over about 20 years. In McIntosh’s previous work, he and his colleagues sketched the outline of a 22-year extended solar cycle using observations of coronal bright points, ephemeral flickers of extreme ultraviolet light in the solar atmosphere. Sunspot Cycle 25 starts with a bang what will follow? The new research was supported by the National Science Foundation, which is NCAR’s sponsor, and NASA’s Living With a Star Program. “If our forecast proves correct, we will have evidence that our framework for understanding the Sun’s internal magnetic machine is on the right path.” ![]() “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,” said NCAR Deputy Director Scott McIntosh, a solar physicist who led the study. We learn something important about the physics of the sun whether or not our prediction turns out to be right- one way we might turn out to be wrong would be if the sun started to behave in a new way.“ Since shorter cycles are followed by more active ones, this leads to a prediction for the size of the upcoming solar maximum. This current study uses the same method to look back in time to get more accurate timings of the cycle lengths. We recently developed a new method to map this irregular cycle into a regular 'solar clock', which is useful for monitoring the solar cycle variation in space weather risk. She said: “The roughly 11-year solar cycle of activity in fact varies from one cycle to the next. This study uses previous research that devised a ‘solar clock’ for the variation in solar activity led by Professor Sandra Chapman, one of the co-authors from the University of Warwick Department of Physics. The 22-year cycles repeat like clockwork and could be a key to finally making accurate predictions of the timing and nature of sunspot cycles, as well as many of the effects they produce, according to the study’s authors. If the new NCAR-led forecast is borne out, it would lend support to the research team’s unorthodox theory – detailed in a series of papers published over the last decade – that the Sun has overlapping 22-year magnetic cycles that interact to produce the well-known, approximately 11-year sunspot cycle as a byproduct. The panel predicts a peak sunspot number of 115. ![]() The cycle that just ended, Sunspot Cycle 24, peaked with a sunspot number of 116, and the consensus forecast from a panel of experts convened by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is predicting that Sunspot Cycle 25 will be similarly weak. In a new article published in Solar Physics, the research team predicts that Sunspot Cycle 25 will peak with a maximum sunspot number somewhere between approximately 210 and 260, which would put the new cycle in the company of the top few ever observed. In direct contradiction to the official forecast, a team that includes University of Warwick scientists and led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is predicting that the Sunspot Cycle that started this fall could be one of the strongest since record-keeping began. Uses timings based on work on a ‘solar clock’ led by University of Warwick physicists Scientists use an extended, 22-year solar cycle to make the forecast ![]()
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