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Originally Posted by Overdog
Has anyone else been following this?
Sun goes longer than normal without producing sunspots
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...Tsuneta said solar physicists aren't like weather forecasters; They can't predict the future. They do have the ability to observe, however, and they have observed a longer-than-normal period of solar inactivity. In the past, they observed that the sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots. That period coincided with a little ice age on Earth that lasted from 1650 to 1700.
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This period, the Maunder Minimum, has spurred considerable study of other stars as well as our Sun. As yet, it is an unexplained phenomenon.
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..."The fact is, we still don’t understand what’s going on in our sun, how magnetic fields generate the 11-year solar cycle, or what caused the magnetic Maunder minimum," said Wright’s advisor, Geoffrey Marcy, professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley. "In particular, we don’t know how often a sun-like star falls into a Maunder minimum, or when the next minimum will occur. It could be tomorrow." ...
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17th century solar oddity believed linked to global cooling is rare among nearby stars
Wiki on Maunder Minimum: >>
Maunder Minimum - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Given the cause(s) of the earlier minimum is/are yet unknown, we can only watch & wait for new developments.
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semantics is not always just pedantic quibbling. ~ douglas r. hofstadter
