Saturday 2 March 2013

Double Peaked Solar Cycle 24? - 2nd March

I've mentioned a couple of times over the past months on this blog as to what is happening, or not happening, with solar cycle 24.  Well 2013 has started off so far being pretty uneventful in terms of solar activity, especially seeing as 2013 is supposed to be the year solar maximum occurs in.  However recently solar physicists have been looking at past solar cycles and have decided that they haven't been single peaked, rather double peaked events, with a maximum occurring in one solar hemisphere, then a maximum occurring in the the opposite solar hemisphere.  This isn't difficult to believe, in fact if you look back at images on this blog site you will see that activity has been mainly focused in the northern hemisphere.  This means that as 2013 passes we should (in theory!) see more sunspot activity in the solar southern hemisphere, it will be interesting to see if this is the case, let's hope it is!

NASA have produced a great video about this and can be seen below...