The sun is usually quiet these days, at least in the sunspot department.

For the past 11 days, the sun has been devoid of any sunspots or has been experiencing spotless days.

“We’re experiencing a very deep solar minimum,” Chander Bhushan Devgun, President Science Popularisation Association of Communicators and Educators (SPACE) told reporters.

A spotless day is a day without sunspots, a day when the face of the sun is utterly blank, he said.

Spotless days never occur during Solar Max when the sun is active, but they are common during solar minimum, the opposite phase of the 11-year sunspot cycle when the sun is very quiet, he said.

Astronomers keep track of the depth and longevity of a solar minimum by counting the spotless days.

In 2008, no sunspots were observed on 266 of the year’s 366 days, while this year there were no sunspots on 83 of the year’s 95 days.

In 1913, 311 spotless days were seen that is about 85 per cent of the year was spotless.

Sunspots are planet-sized islands of magnetism on the surface of the sun, and they are sources of solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and intense UV radiation.

The sun has a natural cycle of about 11 years of high and low sunspot activity. This was discovered by German astronomer Heinrich Schwabe in the mid-1800s.

Plotting sunspot counts, Schwabe saw that peaks of solar activity were always followed by valleys of relative calm, a clockwork pattern that has held true for more than 200 years.

Bureau Report
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