21 May 2020 - Correction: The story was originally sourced by The Sun which had inconclusive factual information and quoted below. We regret the error in fact-checking, and subsequently the story has been corrected with latest facts and scientific information on the subject matter since the time of publishing.
Original Published Date: 16 May 2020
Activities on the surface of the sun keep fluctuating with time. While several phenomena are associated with the period when there is an increase in their frequency, there is also a period of solar minimum that marks the opposite. Experts now believe that a deep solar minimum is underway.
Our sun is currently believed to be in a period of solar minimum wherein the solar activity on its surface has reduced. We try to explain what it means further in this article.
One expert is pointing at the reduced number of sunspots on the surface of the sun as likely evidence of the sun entering a state of lowered solar activity.?
Astronomer Dr. Tony Phillips explains that the ¡°Sunspot counts suggest it is one of the deepest of the past century,¡± in a report by The Sun.
It is the only index for which humans have a long and detailed historical record for an indicator on solar activity levels, though it has now been replaced with modern?indices such as the 10.7 centimetre solar flux.
The sun's reduced level of solar activity is nothing the sun hasn't done before, or won't do in the future; as far as its effects here on earth are concerned, you can breathe easy and stop panicking.
Sun's lockdown or solar minimum, as its rightly called, is part of the solar cycle where the sun's magnetic pole flips. Since the sun's magnetic field controls the sun's overall activity, during the flipping of its magnetic poles it experiences solar minimum or reduced level of activity -- as indicated by reduced number of sunspots and flares, for instance.
The sun's magnetic poles switch their positions (from north to south and south to north, respectively) every 11 years, according to NASA. So all of us have already experienced solar minimums in our past at least once, if not several times, without us even knowing.
Does the reduction in sun's activity level mean it won't be as hot, or all of us here on earth get respite from all the heat and global warming, maybe? Not a chance, unfortunately, according to NASA.
?"The warming caused by the greenhouse gas emissions from the human burning of fossil fuels is six times greater than the possible decades-long cooling from a prolonged Grand Solar Minimum," NASA's Global Climate Change team said in February this year. What this means is that there's no mini ice age to look forward to, as a result of the solar minimum.
If anything, only astronauts in space need to be worried about the solar minimum, as it's a time when cosmic rays from other objects (like supernovae) in our galaxy continues to bombard the Earth. Our atmosphere protects us from these cancer-causing cosmic rays for the most part here on terra firma, but astronauts dwelling in space need to be extra cautious.
"During solar minimum, the Sun's magnetic field weakens and provides less shielding from these cosmic rays," according to astronomer Dean Pesnell of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in 2017, and he thinks it can pose an increased threat to astronauts traveling through space