For a long time, scientists thought the Sun was going to be quiet for a long time. Since the 1980s, solar activity has been going down, and it reached a “deep solar minimum” in 2008. Many people thought there would be a long period of low activity, like the Maunder Minimum. But a new study from NASA shows that this tendency has changed in a big way. The Sun is now more active than it has been in years, which might have big effects for our world.
Researchers were surprised by the results, which were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Jamie Jasinski, the main author from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said, “The Sun is coming out of its quiet phase.” The study looked at long-term data from NASA’s ACE and Wind missions and discovered that important solar wind factors like speed, density, temperature, thermal pressure, and magnetic field strength have been continuously rising since 2008. This doesn’t fit with the usual 11-year solar cycle. For instance, from 2008 to 2025, the density of solar wind went up by roughly 26% and the thermal pressure went up by 45%.
This new solar activity shows itself as a big rise in space weather events like solar flares, storms, and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). These strong eruptions from the Sun can harm astronauts and spacecraft, as well as communication systems, GPS networks, and even electrical grids on Earth.
Scientists still don’t know why the Sun goes through long periods of silence or heightened activity. They confess they don’t fully grasp why these things happen. This is why NASA’s top aim is to figure out the Sun’s “ever-changing personality.”
NASA is going to start new missions on September 23 to help them get ready for and predict future space weather events. The Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) and the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory are two of the missions that are meant to give us better early warnings of solar events. This will help keep our technology safe on Earth and protect future explorers who travel to the Moon and Mars.