The sun might sleep in 15 years

By Anjali Singh Deswal 

Just 15 more years and the arrival of intense cold similar to the one raged during the “Little Ice Age”, which froze the world during the XVII century and in the beginning of the XVIII century, is expected.

The sun will go off to sleep in the years 2030 to 2040. In 17th century, though there was a prolonged of the solar activity called the Maunder minimum, which lasted roughly from 1645 to 1700. During this period, there were only about 50 sunspots instead of the usual 40-50 thousand sunspots.

In the current study published in 3 peer-reviewed papers, the researchers analyzed a total background magnetic field from full disk magnetograms for three cycles of solar activity (21-23) by applying the so-called “principal component analysis”, which allows to reduce the data dimensionality and noise and to identify waves with the largest contribution to the observational data.

As a result, the researchers developed a new method of analysis, which helped to uncover, that the magnetic waves in the Sun are generated in pairs, with the main pair covering 40% of variance of the data. The principal component pair is responsible for the variations of a dipole field of the Sun, which is changing its polarity from pole to pole during 11 year solar activity.

The magnetic waves interacts with each other in the hemisphere where they have maximum (Northern for odd cycles and Southern for even ones). These two components are assumed to originate in two different layers in the solar interior (inner and outer) with close, but not equal, frequencies and a variable phase shift.

The scientists managed to derive the analytical formula, describing the evolution of these two waves and calculated the summary curve, which was linked to the variations of sunspot numbers, the original proxy of solar activity, if one used the modulus of the summary curve. By using this formula the scientists made first the prediction of magnetic activity in the cycle 24, which gave 97% accuracy in comparison with the principal components derived from the observations.

Inspired by this success, the authors extended the prediction of these two magnetic waves to the next two cycle 25 and 26 and discovered that the waves become fully separated into the opposite hemispheres in cycle 26 and thus have little chance of interacting and producing sunspot numbers. This will lead to a sharp decline in solar activity in years 2030 – 2040 comparable with the conditions existed previously during the Maunder minimum in the XVII century when there were only about 50-70 sunspots observed instead of the usual 40-50 thousand expected.

The new reduction of the solar activity will lead to reduction of the solar irradiance. This resulted in significant cooling of Earth and very severe winters and cold summers.

However, only the time will show soon enough (within the next 5-15 years) if this will happen.

These conclusions were presented by Prof. V.Zharkova (Northumbria University), along with Dr Helen Popova of the Skobeltsyn Institute of Nuclear Physics, professor Simon Shepherd of Bradford University (UK) and Dr Sergei Zharkov of Hull University (UK).