Why Is This Year's Solar Cycle So Intense? (Script) (Patreon)

It’s May 8th this year. On the blazing surface of the Sun, a collection of sunspots have been growing for days, ignored by most of us but watched with fascination and some confusion by solar astronomers. These dark spots marked the presence of an invisible tangle of magnetic fields that held enormous magnetic energy—energy that would be released in a series of eruptions, sending a blast of plasma and magnetic field directly at the Earth.  Two days later this coronal mass ejection plowed into Earth’s own magnetic field, causing auroras that were visible in the tropics. I was in upstate New York and the entire northern sky was ablaze, albeit dimly. And the Sun is only getting started. Solar activity is still increasing in a sunspot cycle that is proving way more intense than scientists predicted. Just how much stronger is it going to get?

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The magnetic storm back in May was the strongest experienced by the Earth since 1989, and we’re still at least a few months of the peak of activity in the current 11-year solar cycle. Which is weird, because this—the 25th cycle since sunspot monitoring began—was supposed to be a particularly weak one. In fact, the strength of the solar cycles had been decreasing for decades. Instead, the Sun’s activity for this cycle is rising far more rapidly than predicted, towards an imminent polarity reversal of the Sun’s entire magnetic field.

So what’s going on? Why does the Sun’s magnetic field act so crazy and why is it acting so unpredictably crazy right now and how much more crazy is it going to get? To answer these excellent questions we’re going to have to ask some more basic questions first: What’s the source of the Sun’s magnetic field? Why does solar activity change over an 11 year cycle? What causes the magnetic field to flip direction, resetting the cycle? And how can we predict the strength of a solar cycle in advance?

First though, a quick 101 on solar structure. The Sun’s interior has three main parts—the core where hydrogen is fused into helium, a process that produces all of the Sun’s energy. Then you have the radiative zone where fusion power is transported upwards by high-energy photons bouncing their way through the dense plasma. Finally you have the convection zone, where energy is transported by flows of plasma carrying heat up to the surface

The core and the radiative zone are fluids, but they rotate like solid spheres, with all latitudes completing a rotation in the same amount of time. But the convective zone is much more sloshy and fluid-like. Over most of the top 30% of the solar radius, the equatorial material rotates once per 25 days, while the stuff at the poles takes a lot longer—34 days to rotate once.

Broadly speaking, the Sun’s magnetic field is generated in the same way as Earth’s—by the dynamo effect. In the Earth, this happens when circular currents in Earth’s liquid metal outer core amplify small magnetic fields, which amplify the circular currents, and through a positive feedback process build a self-sustaining global dipole field, sort of like a giant bar magnet. We did an episode on this.

The processes behind the Sun’s magnetic field are less well established because it’s very hard to make measurements beneath the solar surface. What I’m about to describe represents a set of current leading ideas, but this is subject to modification as we learn more. In the Sun, it’s believed that interactions between the solid-like radiative zone and the sloshy convective zone lead to various swirly currents, for example through turbulence and/or the coriolis force. This kickstarts the dynamo effect just like in the Earth. At first, this field looks much like the Earth’s simple dipole field. There’s a north pole, a south pole, and great loops of magnetic force forming concentric shells outside the Sun and in the solar interior passing through the plasma flows of the dynamo.

Earth’s magnetic field rotates at the same rate as its mostly-solid interior, and so is pretty stable. That’s not the case for the Sun. Its magnetic field is generated and supported in the convective zone, where, if you recall, the equator rotates faster than the poles. This differential rotation drags the nicely-aligned dynamo generators and their magnetic fields out of north-south alignment, twisting these field lines around the Sun. The result is that the dipole field lines get slowly transformed into a ring around the solar interior. The technical terms for these two directions are poloidal—towards the poles for the original dipole field—and toroidal—like a torus for the ring-like lines. This coiling of the poloidal into toroidal field lines is known as the omega process.

That was step one in breaking the Sun’s magnetic field. Now another cool bit of physics gets to work—magnetic buoyancy. When you have a tube of magnetic flux in a conducting fluid in a gravitational field, the tube will tend to rise to the surface. At a given depth beneath the surface of the Sun, the pressure has to be the same everywhere. In the magnetic flux tube, the magnetic field contributes part of that pressure. That means the pressure of the plasma in that tube has to be lower in order to have the correct pressure for that depth. So we have lower pressure plasma that’s the same temperature as its surroundings. That can only be true if the density of that plasma is also lower. Therefore the magnetic flux tube rises towards the surface. The stronger the magnetic field, the stronger the magnetic buoyancy, so as the toroidal field winds itself up, more and more field lines push to the surface.

And now those rising flux tubes experience yet another influence—the Sun’s coriolis force. This is the same effect that generates hurricanes on Earth. The speed of the Sun’s plasma varies with latitude due to the differential rotation, but also due to the fact that the Sun is roughly spherical. The stuff at the equator has to travel a greater distance in one rotation to make it all the way around the sphere compared to the poles. This leads to a further twisting of the magnetic field lines, inducing kinks. These kinks can then protrude from the Sun’s surface. This kinking of the toroidal magnetic field is called the alpha process.

The strong magnetism in these kinks can shut down convection where they protrude from the Sun’s surface. With heat no longer being efficiently carried to the surface in that region, it cools down and so looks a lot darker than the surrounding solar surface, leading ot sunspots. This whole story nicely explains some of the features of sunspots. They tend to appear in pairs with opposite polarity where the one magnetic kink emerges from and reenters the solar surface. Sunspot pairs are often duplicated above and below the equator whether the same toroidal field line becomes kinked in both hemispheres. 

As our magnetic field gets wound up, it increases in strength. The relatively weak poloidal field during the solar minimum becomes a very strong toroidal field at the solar maximum. At the beginning of this process the field lines pile up at mid-latitudes, and that’s where sunspots first appear. As the winding intensifies the toroidal field approaches the equator, and the sunspots follow, and the number of sunspots also increases. This migration of sunspots from high to low latitudes and their increase in number is seen in the so-called butterfly diagrams, which show the number and location of sunspots over a series of solar cycles.

The magnetic kinks emerging from the solar surface have strengths several hundred times higher than the baseline surface magnetic field. These kinks are not very stable. There’s an enormous amount of energy stored in these tangled and twisted magnetic flux tubes. They can release that energy when various tightly knotted or twisted flux tubes reconnect into a more orderly configuration. The pent-up energy is released in this reconnection, and the result is often an explosive ejection of plasma and magnetic field from the Sun’s surface: a coronal mass ejection like the ones that caused massive auroras back in May.

OK, so we’ve wound up our magnetic field and then tangled it into a horrible, chaotic mess. We know that this tangling happens in cycles, but how does the Sun reverse this process? As the toroidal field winds up to maximum intensity and the coriolis force rotates these field lines back into poloidal lines, we start to get lots of north-south mini-loops. Loops beneath the surface begin to connect to loops close to or above the surface to form much larger magnetic loops. Because of the direction of the line twisting by the coriolis force, these loops have polarities opposite that of the original poloidal field. Over time, the strength of these growing loops will exceed that of the original field. At that point the magnetic field flips direction. In essence, the little coriolis-induced kinks in the toroidal field become the new flipped global dipole field. At the same time, that wound-up toroidal field is fragmented by all these magnetic reconnections and it decays away. And so the whole process starts again with a nice, clean dipole field. Ok, now that we know how the solar cycle works. Let’s see if we can answer some of our questions.

We know why the cycle happens and why it resets. But why does this take eleven years? Well, because that’s how long it takes. That’s the amount of winding needed to turn the nice gentle dipole, poloidal field into a tightly-wound and sufficiently unstable toroidal field. 

That 11 years is also an average. Sometimes it takes a bit longer, sometimes a bit shorter. There’s even evidence of double cycles in the past—two very short cycles masquerading as a single longer one. We can actually look to the geological record to track solar cycles back 11,000 years. For example, Beryllium-10 is a long-lived radioactive isotope formed when cosmic rays hit the atmosphere. Stronger solar maxima mean more cosmic rays, so by measuring its levels of beryllium-10 in Antarctic ice cores we can get both the duration and strength of ancient cycles. And it turns out solar cycles have lasted on average 11-ish years for at least as long as human civilization. There are fossil records that suggest that stability goes back 700 million years. The average cycle length may be stable, but the intensity of cycles fluctuates a lot. 

Over the geological record, solar activity appears to rise and fall through several peaks and valleys that each last decades to centuries. The last deep valley was the Maunder minimum in the latter half of the 1600’s, right near the beginning of our effort to actually count sunspots year after year. At the depths of this minimum sunspot activity was around 1000 times lower than in the modern era. 

The most recent several cycles—since the 1940s—have actually been of above average strengths, leading to what we call the modern maximum. But over the past few cycles that maximum appears to have been winding down—quite dramatically in fact, leading some to wonder if we’re approaching a new Maunder-like minimum. That is, until the current cycle got started, when its intensity defied all predictions. So how do we make these forecasts? And why are they so hard to get right?

The strength of a given cycle seems to be correlated with a number of things. For example, the strength of the current cycle plays some role in determining how strong the next cycle will be, but there’s a lot of variation. A much better predictor for the strength of the next solar maximum seems to be the strength of the poloidal or dipole field during the solar minimum. That makes sense. After all, that poloidal field is what gets wound up into a strong toroidal field, leading to more kinks, more sunspots, etc. etc. But the reconstruction of a new poloidal field from the chaotic fields at the previous solar maximum is much harder to predict because it depends in detail on how well the kinks in the toroidal field happen to line up and reconnect.

During cycle 24 there was speculation that cycle intensity may continue to drop, leading to a weak cycle 25 and perhaps continuing the trend towards a new long-lasting period of low solar activity. But solar experts didn’t place much stock in these predictions because at that stage we just didn’t know. But as cycle 24 bottomed out, the newly rebuilt poloidal field was stronger than expected. In 2019, at the depths of this minimum, experts convened and produced this projection for the number of sunspots and magnetic field during cycle 25. It was supposed to be around the same strength as cycle 24, relatively weak compared to the modern maximum, but not continuing the imagined fall towards a new Maunder minimum.

This is what cycle 25 actually turned out to be—at least to date. A much steeper rise in activity, indicating we’re in for a stronger and probably shorter cycle. Scientists have been updating their models based on ongoing solar activity. The previous study estimated a cycle peak in 2025, but now the peak and the accompanying flip in the magnetic field looks scheduled for later this year. 

So what went wrong? Well, nothing really. Currently we forecast the strength and length of a solar cycle based on various measurables—like sunspot numbers and field strengths and field properties at different times. But these are crude metrics for an extraordinarily complex system of plasma and magnetic field dynamics. Scientists are also doing some incredibly sophisticated simulations of this complex system. But these simulations can’t make detailed predictions—they’re primary value is in exploring the deep physics at work, which can allow us to come up with better heuristics to use in our predictions.

Solar cycle 25 is ramping up to be a good one. It probably won’t be as strong as those in the peak of the modern maximum—although it’s too early to be entirely sure about that. But it’s likely that before this cycle is done we’ll get some more spectacular solar activity, and perhaps auroral activity with it. Keep your eyes on the space weather forecasts and maybe find a dark place to watch the sky next time the Sun’s twisted field snaps, sending blasts of magnetic plasma to bombard our terrestrial space time.