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In Nov. 2020, some noise was being made about the terminator event that seemed to say that it had occurred. It seems that it was the beginning phase which had begun.
Here is a rundown on the "terminator event": The Sun's Weather Cycle May Start in 'Tsunamis,' End with 'Terminators' "A pair of related studies have mapped out the sun's activity over the course of 140 years, looking for clues about the solar cycle that are visible on the surface. By looking at the way bright flashes of ultraviolet light migrate across the sun's surface, the researchers discovered that the sun's mysterious 11-year cycle may be marked by a "terminator" event that ends one cycle and a "tsunami" of magnetic fields that initiates a new one. Those bright flickers of ultraviolet light and the sun's magnetic fields appear to drive the cycle itself, and monitoring those flashes could help scientists predict when a new cycle will begin." The first study looked for markers of the end of a solar cycle. Using 140 years of solar observations, the team of scientists studied the movement of so-called coronal bright points, or flickers of extreme ultraviolet light in the sun's corona.
The light flickers first appear at a higher altitude than the sunspots and move toward the equator, the researchers found. There, the flickers overlap with the sunspots in the midlatitudes before both flickers and sunspots reach the equator and disappear, the study said.
Their disappearance, which the scientists deemed as the "terminator" event, is shortly followed by a large burst of activity in the flickering lights.
A computer simulation of a "solar tsunami," which causes the birth of a new sunspot cycle. (Image credit: UCAR)
In direct contradiction to the official forecast, a team of scientists led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is predicting that the Sunspot Cycle that started this fall could be one of the strongest since record-keeping began.
In a new article published inSolar Physics, the research team predicts that Sunspot Cycle 25 will peak with a maximum sunspot number somewhere between approximately 210 and 260, which would put the new cycle in the company of the top few ever observed.
LEFT: Oppositely charged magnetic bands, represented in red and blue, march toward the equator over a 22-year period. When they meet at the equator, they annihilate one another.
"NCAR Deputy Director Scott McIntosh is a solar physicist who led the study. He said: Scientists have struggled to predict both the length and the strength of sunspot cycles because we lack a fundamental understanding of the mechanism that drives the cycle. If our forecast proves correct, we will have evidence that our framework for understanding the sun’s internal magnetic machine is on the right path.
