New sunspot cycle ‘could be one of the strongest ever’ as sun ‘wakes up’

The sun could be dotted with hundreds of sunspots, as it enters one of the strongest sunspot cycles since records began, a new study has suggested.

The prediction is based on a new 22-year cycle, which could offer scientists a way to predict space weather, according to Warwick University researchers.

The team said that the new cycle could see a maximum of 260 sunspots, regions of reduced surface temperature on our sun which appear as black dots, caused by magnetism.

They are strongly magnetised and can crackle with solar flares – magnetic explosions which bathe Earth in X-rays and UV radiation.

Watch: Telescope captures eerie closeup of a sunspot

Read more: The Sun is getting quieter as it hits ‘solar minimum’

Sunspots are generally thought to appear and disappear in cycles lasting 11 years: the most recent, sunspot cycle 24, peaked with 117.

Scientists at Warwick University and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) said the new cycle will peak with a maximum sunspot number of between 210 and 250.

The reason they can predict it is because the 11-year cycle on the sun is actually part of a larger, 22-year cycle which can be used to predict sunspot activity, the researchers added.

The team said that the sun has overlapping 22-year magnetic cycles that interact to produce the well-known 11-year sunspot cycle as a byproduct.

The 22-year cycles repeat like clockwork and could be a key to finally making accurate predictions of the timing and intensity of sunspot cycles.

Professor Sandra Chapman, one of the co-authors from the University of Warwick Department of Physics said: “The roughly 11-year solar cycle of activity in fact varies from one cycle to the next.

“We recently developed a new method to map this irregular cycle into a regular 'solar clock', which is useful for monitoring the solar cycle variation in space weather risk.

“This current study uses the same method to look back in time to get more accurate timings of the cycle lengths.

“Since shorter cycles are followed by more active ones, this leads to a prediction for the size of the upcoming solar maximum.

“We learn something important about the physics of the sun whether or not our prediction turns out to be right. One way we might turn out to be wrong would be if the sun started to behave in a new way.“

Read more: Spacecraft malfunction as Earth’s magnetic field weakens

So far, scientists have struggled to predict sunspot cycles, says NCAR deputy director Scott McIntosh, a solar physicist who led the study.

McIntosh said, “We lack a fundamental understanding of the mechanism that drives the cycle.

“If our forecast proves correct, we will have evidence that our framework for understanding the sun’s internal magnetic machine is on the right path.”

In McIntosh’s previous work, he and his colleagues sketched the outline of a 22-year extended solar cycle using observations of coronal bright points, ephemeral flickers of extreme ultraviolet light in the solar atmosphere.

These bright points can be seen marching from the sun’s high latitudes to the equator over about 20 years.

As they cross the mid-latitudes, the bright points coincide with the emergence of sunspot activity.

McIntosh believes the bright points mark the travel of magnetic field bands, which wrap around the sun.

When the bands from the northern and southern hemispheres – which have oppositely charged magnetic fields, meet at the equator, they mutually annihilate one another leading to a “terminator” event.

These terminators are crucial markers on the sun’s 22-year clock, McIntosh added, because they flag the end of a magnetic cycle, along with its corresponding sunspot cycle, and act as a trigger for the following magnetic cycle to begin.

Watch: Astronaut shows glimpse of earth From space