Maunder Minimum tagged posts

Astronomers identified a nearby star whose sunspot cycles appear to have stopped. Studying this star might help explain the unusual period from the mid 1600s to the early 1700s when our Sun paused its sunspot cycles.

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 s...

Image of our sun showing dark sunspots and bright diffuse faculae (best seen around the edges). A new study shows how the larger mix of heavy elements leave such spots unchanged, while increasing the contrast of the bright diffuse faculae. Credit: NASA/SDO

The spots on the surface on the Sun come and go with an 11-year periodicity known as the solar cycle. The solar cycle is driven by the solar dynamo, which is an interplay between magnetic fields, convection and rotation. However, our understanding of the physics underlying the solar dynamo is far from complete. One example is the Maunder Minimum, a period in the 17th century, where spots almost disappeared from the surface of the Sun for a period of over 50 years.

Now, a large international team has found a star that can help shed light ...

About 80 solar cycles seen from the surface, i.e. more than 1,000 years in solar time, modelled by means of a computer simulation. At 20-50 years in simulation time, a simulated grand minimum occurs, which in actual fact is the maximum of magnetic energy. Credit: Image courtesy of Aalto University

The study of the Sun’s long-term variation over a millennium by means of super computer modelling showed that during a time period of the Maunder Minimum type, the magnetic field may hide at the bottom of the convection zone. The study seeks explanation for the mechanisms underlying the long-term variation in solar activity. The recently published study was carried out by running a global computer model of the Sun on Finland’s most powerful super computer over 6 months.

‘The Sun has an 11-year cy...

Is Earth slowly heading for a new ice age? Looking at the decreasing number of sunspots, it may seem that we are entering a nearly spotless solar cycle which could result in lower temperatures for decades. “The solar cycle is starting to decline. Now we have less active regions visible on the sun’s disk,” Yaireska M. Collado-Vega, a space weather forecaster at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Maunder Minimum is also known as the “prolonged sunspot minimum”, which was a period starting in about 1645 and continuing to about 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time.

But does it really mean a colder climate for our planet in the near future? In 1645, the so-called Maunder Minimum period started, when there were almost no sunspots...