TORONTO — It’s been well understood for some time now that the sun goes through an 11-year cycle with a solar minimum and a solar maximum where activity varies. However, new research has concluded that the sun also has a seasonal year-long cycle that can influence us here on Earth.
Though to us the sun seems static, it’s actually extremely dynamic. It is constantly active with bubbling plasma, looping magnetic fields, and much more.
Why does the sun’s activity — 149,600,000 km away — matter to us? Because Earth, and particularly our way of life (such as the dependence on electronics), is highly influenced by solar activity. A massive solar storm could take out GPS navigation and disrupt satellite electronics and cause radio blackouts. In fact, this happened in March 1989 in Quebec.
READ MORE: How solar storms could leave us in the dark
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The sun, like every other body in our solar system, rotates. It also has hemispheres. The researchers concluded that the magnetic field in each of the sun’s hemispheres has bands that change over the course of about a year.
Using NASA satellites as well as ground-based observatories, they found that the magnetic field works on a 330-day cycle.
“People have not paid much attention to this nearly-annual cycle,” said Scott McIntosh, lead author of the paper and director of the High Altitude Observatory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
“But it’s such a driver of space weather that we really do need to focus on it. Cycles over this time frame are observed in all sorts of output from the sun: the sun’s radiance, the solar wind, solar flares, CMEs.”
This new information may help scientists better understand the influence of these magnetic fields and better forecast space weather.
“What we’re looking at here is a massive driver of solar storms,” said McIntosh. “By better understanding how these activity bands form in the Sun and cause seasonal instabilities, there’s the potential to greatly improve forecasts of space weather events.”
The research was published in the April 7 edition of Nature Communications.
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