Scientists tell us that current solar activity is "stranger than at any time in more than a century." Recent weird weather on a global scale may have been caused by the ‘fickle’ sun.
The sun is producing barely half the normal number of sunspots usually seen at the peak of an 11-year cycle of activity called the ‘solar maximum.’ Scientists are ‘dumbfounded!’
David Hathaway, the head of the solar physics group at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, recently stated, "I would say that the current peak in sunspots is the weakest in at least 200 years."
Based on historical records, astronomers say that the sun should be producing sunspots broader than the size of the earth causing problems like short-circuiting satellites, smothering cellular signals and damaging electrical systems. But, this is not happening, a scientific ‘mystery’ of sorts.
"There is no scientist alive who has seen a peaking solar cycle as weak as this one," according to Andres Munoz-Jaramillo, a professor at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
To complicate this "solar riddle," the sun is likewise undergoing one if its oddest ‘magnetic reversals’ in recorded history.
