Solar Minimum Is Here, and it’s one of the Deepest in a Century

NOAA has released a new interactive tool to explore the solar cycle, which lets you scroll back through time, comparing sunspot counts now to peaks and valleys of the past.

One thing is clear. Solar Minimum is here, and it’s one of the deepest in a century.

Solar minimum

Solar Minimum is a natural part of the solar cycle. Every ~11 years, the sun transitions from high to low activity and back again. Solar Maximum. Solar Minimum. Repeat.

The cycle was discovered in 1843 by Samuel Heinrich Schwabe, who noticed the pattern after counting sunspots for 17 years. We are now exiting Solar Cycle 24 and entering Solar Cycle 25.

2019-2020 a century-class Solar Minimum

In 2019, the sun went 281 days without sunspots, and 2020 is producing spotless suns at about the same rate.

To find a year with fewer sunspots, you have to go all the way back to 1913, which had 311 spotless days.

This makes 2019-2020 a century-class Solar Minimum; solar flares are rare, geomagnetic storms are almost non-existent, and Earth’s upper atmosphere is cooling.

Mini-ice age ahead?

Some people worry that the sun could “get stuck” in Solar Minimum, producing a mini-Ice Age caused by low solar activity. According to scientists, there is no evidence this is happening. On the contrary, the next solar cycle (Solar Cycle 25) is showing unmistakable signs of life.

On May 29th, the sun unleashed the strongest solar flare in years–an M1-class eruption that just missed Earth. The blast came from an active region belonging to Solar Cycle 25.