The Sun is quickly approaching its solar maximum, or the apex of its 11-year solar cycle where its activity ramps up ahead of its magnetic poles flipping. That was expected in summer 2025, but now experts say it will likely happen much, much sooner than that. Like, mark your holiday calendar soon.
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00:00 The Sun is quickly approaching its solar maximum, or the apex of its 11-year solar cycle where
00:08 its activity ramps up, ahead of its magnetic poles flipping.
00:12 That was expected in summer 2025, but now experts say it will likely happen much, much
00:17 sooner than that.
00:19 The study was conducted by researchers from the Center of Excellence in Space Sciences
00:23 India, and they say it's set to happen a full year and a half early, meaning they expect
00:27 the solar maximum to occur in January 2024.
00:31 So if it does happen in just over a month's time, what happened?
00:34 And why were the experts so far off?
00:36 Well, there's still a lot we don't know about the Sun and its activity, but their new predictions
00:40 are based on counting sunspots where magnetic fields are in flux.
00:43 The more there are, the faster the solar maximum may arrive.
00:46 And that's key because solar maximums include more solar activity, like solar flares and
00:51 coronal mass ejections.
00:52 Those solar storms send out electrically charged particles that have the possibility of slamming
00:56 into our planet and causing all sorts of problems, including messing with satellites, interrupting
01:01 communications and damaging our power grids.
01:03 The researchers say if the solar maximum does occur much earlier than predicted, it could
01:07 shed some light on how to better estimate solar maximums moving forward.
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