The Sun Didn't Have any Sunspots for 70 Years, now we Might Know why - by BrianKoberlein
Sunspots are one of the ways we can measure the activity level of the Sun. Generally, the more sunspots we observe, the more active the Sun is. We’ve been tracking sunspots since the early 1600s, and we’ve long known that solar activity has an 11-year cycle of high and low activity. It’s an incredibly regular cycle. But from 1645 to 1715 that cycle was broken. During this time the Sun entered an extremely quiet period that has come to be known as the Maunder Minimum.
Ideally, astronomers would love to count the sunspots, or starspots, of other stars over time, but this isn’t easily done. We can’t observe the surface details of Sun-like stars, and starspots are typically small compared to the size of a star, so they barely decrease the brightness of a star over time. Random fluctuations in solar brightness easily overwhelm any change in brightness due to starspots. But there is a way to measure stellar activity indirectly.
. It just so happens that Mount Wilson Observatory started measuring the H-K lines of about 400 stars in 1966, and measured them for three decades.In a recent study, a team of astronomers combined the Mount Wilson observations with more recent data from observatories such as Keck to measure the activity cycle of 59 stars across 50 to 60 years. They were able to confirm the cycles of 29 of them, by observing at least two full cycles. No small feat given that some of the stars have 20-year cycles.
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