And there shall be signs in the sun........Men's hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth... Luke 21:25,26....Imagine this Solar Activity causing a CME that knocks out all electricity---including generators---to a large segment of earth...
"Every 11 years, the Sun's poles swap places; south becomes north and north becomes south. It's not clear what drives these cycles, but we do know that the poles switch when the magnetic field is at its weakest.
Because the Sun's magnetic field controls its activity - sunspots (temporary regions of strong magnetic fields), solar flares, and coronal mass ejections (produced by magnetic field lines snapping and reconnecting) - this stage of the cycle manifests as a period of very minimal activity. It's called the solar minimum.
Once the poles have switched, the magnetic field strengthens, and solar activity rises to a solar maximum before subsiding for the next polar switch.
McIntosh noticed something interesting. Over the course of about 20 years or so, flickers of extreme ultraviolet light called coronal bright points seem to move from the poles towards the equator, meeting in the middle.
The movement of these bright points across the mid-latitudes seems to coincide with sunspot activity.
These bright points, McIntosh believes, are linked with bands of magnetic fields that wrap around the Sun, propagating from the poles to the equator every 11 years or so.
Because they have opposite polarity, when they meet in the middle, they cancel each other out - what the researchers call a "terminator". These terminator events mark the end of a solar magnetic cycle, and the start of the next. But they don't always take exactly the same amount of time. Sometimes these bands slow down as they reach mid-latitudes, which means that the length of time between terminator events varies. And the team noticed that there's a correlation between the length of time between terminators and the intensity of the following solar maximum.
Solar Cycle 24 was much quieter than the cycles that preceded it. But it was also really short, coming in under the 10-year mark. If the team's analyses are in point, we should be in for a lot of sunspots by the mid-2020s.
Our method predicts that SC25 could be among the strongest sunspot cycles ever observed, depending on when the upcoming termination happens, and it is highly likely that it will certainly be stronger than present SC24 (sunspot number of 116) and most likely stronger than the previous SC23 (sunspot number of 180). " SolarPhysics
