Space Events

Is our Sun falling silent?

"I've been a solar physicist for 30 years, and I've never seen anything quite like this," says the head of space physics at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. The Sun's face is strangely featureless. "If you want to go back to see when the Sun was this inactive... you've got to go back about 100 years."

This solar lull is baffling scientists, because right now the Sun should be awash with activity. It has reached its solar maximum, the point in its 11-year cycle where activity is at a peak.This giant ball of plasma should be peppered with sunspots, exploding with flares and spewing out huge clouds of charged particles into space in the form of coronal mass ejections. But apart from the odd event, like some recent solar flares, it has been very quiet. And this damp squib of a maximum follows a solar minimum - the period when the Sun's activity troughs - that was longer and lower than scientists expected.

There is a significant chance that the Sun could become increasingly quiet. An analysis of ice-cores, which hold a long-term record of solar activity, suggests the decline in activity is the FASTEST THAT HAS BEEN SEEN IN 10,000 YEARS. "It's an UNUSUALLY RAPID DECLINE."

"We estimate that within about 40 years or so there is a 10% to 20% - nearer 20% - probability that we'll be back in Maunder Minimum conditions." The era of solar inactivity in the 17th Century coincided with a period of bitterly cold winters in Europe. Londoners enjoyed frost fairs on the Thames after it froze over, snow cover across the continent increased, the Baltic Sea iced over - the conditions were so harsh, some describe it as a mini-Ice Age.