The sun suddenly goes very quiet

London: The sun seems to have given itself a few days off.

According to a slew of reports in the media, there were absolutely no sunspots on July 17. That’s the first sunspot-free day since 2011, reports said.

The observations made by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, was referenced to data from the Belgium’s Sunspot Index and Long-term Solar Observations project,

“Just a few weeks ago it was bursting with sunspots but now it seems to be going days without even developing a single dark spot ,” solar physicist Tony Phillips said, naming it an ‘All Quiet Event’.

Sunspots attract attention because they highlight the part of the sun where solar activity, such as this solar flare, originates. “It’s weird, but it’s not super weird,” he told The LA Times.

Scientists were expecting to see a lot of solar activity since the sun is going through ‘solar maximum’ the time in the sun's 11-year cycle when it is the most active.

“To have a spotless day during maximum is odd, but then again, this solar maximum we are in has been very wimpy,” he said.

Back on August 14, 2011, the sun was completely free of spots and that year still managed to have a high rate of solar activity.

“It all underlines that solar physicists really don’t know what the heck is happening on the sun,” he said. “We just don't know how to predict the sun, that is the take away message of this event.”
Alex Young, a helio physicist at Goddard Space Flight Centre, echoed that sentiment. “We’ve only been observing the sun in lots of detail in the last 50 years,” Mr Young said. “That’s not that long considering it’s been around for 4.5 billion years.”

Sunspots are interesting because they are the regions where solar activity such as solar flares (giant flashes of light) and coronal mass ejections (when material from the sun is shot into space) originate.