Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The Solar Orbiter mission has captured the highest-resolution views of the sun’s surface to date, showcasing massive sunspots related to increasing solar activity.
On 17 April, sunspot group 2994 released an X1.2 flare. [47] [48] However, the complex's activity subsided slightly in the next few days. [49] While crossing the solar limb, sunspot region 2992 emitted M7.3 and X2.2 flares, the latter being the strongest of the cycle up to that point. [49]
Magnetic field lines often connect neighboring sunspots, which are the source of solar eruptions. The plasma, or charged gas, has a temperature of about 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit. Sunspots ...
The sun is growing more active than scientists predicted. About every 11 years, the sun's magnetic fields flip, increasing solar activity. That activity can disrupt radio communications and GPS ...
Now, the sunspots are returning to the side of the sun facing Earth, which means the chances for dazzling auroral displays could increase over the next week, experts say. The birth of solar storms
Sunspot and infrared spectral line measurements made in the latter part of the first decade of the 2000s suggested that sunspot activity may again be disappearing, possibly leading to a new minimum. [48] From 2007 to 2009, sunspot levels were far below average. In 2008, the Sun was spot-free 73 percent of the time, extreme even for a solar minimum.
One historical long-term correlation between solar activity and climate change is the 1645–1715 Maunder minimum, a period of little or no sunspot activity which partially overlapped the "Little Ice Age" during which cold weather prevailed in Europe. The Little Ice Age encompassed roughly the 16th to the 19th centuries.
CMEs often form around sunspots, although scientists aren’t entirely sure why. Sunspot formation is cyclical, and the current solar cycle has reached the highest number of sunspots since 2001 ...