According to NOAA’s Space Environment Center and other solar experts, the next cycle should get rolling in March 2008. This is actually a surprise. Experts originally expected the cycle to begin last fall, but for some reason it was delayed. And the question is, what does the delay of its beginning mean? The experts are actually evenly split; some think it’ll be stronger, and others think it’ll be weaker than normal. The only way to know is to wait and see. If the cycle follows the predictions, it’ll peak sometime between October 2011 and August 2012, with approximately 150 sunspots.
Solar weather forecasting is just as hard as weather forecasting here on Earth. Scientists models and simulations have gotten much better over the last cycle, and they’ll use this cycle to finetune their predictions even better.
Original Source: NOAA News Release
A beautiful nebula in the southern hemisphere with a binary star at it's center seems…
The history of astronomy and observatories is full of stories about astronomers going higher and…
The JWST keeps one-upping itself. In the telescope's latest act of outdoing itself, it examined…
You've seen the Sun, but you've never seen the Sun like this. This single frame…
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have become ubiquitous, with applications ranging from data analysis, cybersecurity,…
The Search for Life in our Solar System leads seekers to strange places. From our…