Our Sun Has Entered a New Cycle, And It Could Be One of The Strongest Ever Recorded

The Sun may be in for a very busy time. According to new predictions, the next maximum in its activity cycles could be one of the strongest we've seen.

This is in direct contradiction to the official solar weather forecast from NASA and the NOAA, but if it bears out, it could confirm a theory about solar activity cycles that scientists have been working on for years.

"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," said solar physicist Scott McIntosh of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research.

"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."

The Sun's activity levels are actually quite variable, and its activity cycles are bound up with its magnetic field.

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.

Generally, we track solar minima by keeping a careful eye on solar activity and working out after the fact that one has occurred. By this metric, the most recent solar minimum took place in December 2019. We're now in the 25th solar cycle since record-keeping began, headed into a solar maximum.

According to NASA and the NOAA, this is expected to be a quiet maximum, with a sunspot peak of around 115 sunspots in July 2025. This is pretty similar to Solar Cycle 24, which had a sunspot peak of 114.

But McIntosh and his colleagues believe differently. In 2014, he and his colleagues published a paper describing their observations of the Sun on a 22-year cycle.

This has long been considered the full solar cycle when the poles return to their starting positions, but 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.

(Scott McIntosh/NCAR)

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.

"When we look back over the 270-year long observational record of terminator events, we see that the longer the time between terminators, the weaker the next cycle," said astronomer Bob Leamon of the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

"And, conversely, the shorter the time between terminators, the stronger the next solar cycle is."

The longest cycle on record based on the time between terminators is Solar Cycle 4, which lasted over 15 years. It was followed by the famous Dalton minimum - a peak of just 82 sunspots in Solar Cycle 5, which lasted nearly 14 years, and 81 sunspots in Solar Cycle 6.

But shorter solar cycles - those that are less than 11 years - are followed by maxima with peaks well above 200 sunspots.

Solar Cycle 23, according to McIntosh's team's metric, was pretty long. It lasted nearly 13 years. And 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.

There's only one way to find out - we have to wait and see. But McIntosh and his team are confident in their interpretation of the Sun's activity. And, if they're right, that will give us a whole new toolset for understanding how the Sun works.

"Once you identify the terminators in the historical records, the pattern becomes obvious," McIntosh said.

"A weak Sunspot Cycle 25, as the community is predicting, would be a complete departure from everything that the data has shown us up to this point."

Physicists have a massive problem as Higgs boson refuses to misbehave

 Physicists have spotted the Higgs boson performing a brand new trick, but one that brings us no closer to understanding the workings of fundamental particles.

The Higgs boson, discovered at the CERN high energy physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, in 2012, is that the particle that offers all other fundamental particles mass, in keeping with the quality model of high-energy physics. However, despite the work of thousands of researchers around the world, nobody has been ready to determine exactly how it does that or why some particles are more massive than others.

The only thanks to trying and solve that problem is by observing how the Higgs interacts with other particles using the massive Hadron Collider (LHC). For the primary time, both of the most important groups that use it – the CMS and ATLAS collaborations – have observed the Higgs decaying into two muons, a kind of particle we've never directly seen it interact with before. Members of the collaborations presented this work at the virtual International Conference on High Energy Physics.

Some researchers have suggested that particles have different masses because there's over one style of Higgs boson, with each sort of Higgs coupled to a special mass range of other particles.

Muons are much less massive than the opposite styles of particles we’ve seen the regular Higgs interact with, therefore the new discovery makes it more likely there's only 1 Higgs. That behavior is precisely what we expect from the quality model. Adam Gibson-Even at Valparaiso University in Indiana, who hasn’t committed to this work, says that it's an instance of “Higgs boson, exactly as ordered”.

But that leaves the mystery of why particles have different masses completely unanswered. While this result might not be surprising, Gibson-Even says, it's somewhat frustrating because we all know the quality model is incomplete – additionally, to not explaining why particles have different masses, it also doesn’t account for the substance or dark energy. Nevertheless, experimental results are entirely in line with the model.

“It’s a controversy within the sense that we all know that the Higgs boson as-is doesn’t explain this stuff,” says CMS researcher Freya Blekman at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium. If the identical Higgs interacts with both muons and heavier particles, that's another avenue to solving the question of mass closed.

The next step, Blekman says, is to require even more precise measurements of the Higgs interacting with a variety of various particles. Many of those measurements have to be more precise than those the LHC can provide, which is an element of the argument for building a more powerful “Higgs factory” collider, she says.

“We have removed scenarios, but we don’t have a proof yet,” says Beekman. “But this can be what high energy physics is about – we've got tens of thousands of predictions and that we should eliminate them.”

Scientists Confirm Entirely New Species of Gelatinous Blob From The Deep, Dark Sea

 

For the primary time, scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have formally identified a replacement species of undersea creature-based solely on high-definition video footage captured at the underside of the ocean.

And what an undersea creature it's. Meet Duobrachium sparks are – a weird, gelatinous species of ctenophore, encountered by the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Deep Discoverer during a dive off the coast of Puerto Rico.

That encounter befell back in 2015, but when you're acquisition to discovering an entirely new species – based solely on video evidence, for that matter, with no physical specimens to assist make your case – it helps to try and do your due diligence.

Luckily, Deep Discoverer's cameras – the footage of which you'll be able to see here – were up to the work, capable of reading subtle details on D. spark she's body but a millimetre long.

Duobrachium sparksae. (NOAA)

Subsequent analysis of the organism – now detailed in an exceedingly new paper – indicates it's easily distinguishable from all other known ctenophore species, the researchers say.

"It's unique because we were able to describe a replacement species based entirely on high-definition video," explains NOAA marine biologist Allen Collins.

"We haven't got the identical microscopes as we might in a very lab, but the video can give us enough information to grasp the morphology intimately, like the situation of their reproductive parts and other aspects."

Those aspects are manifold. From a distance, D. spark she's most notable feature is its bulbous, balloon-like body, but it also features two prominent tentacle arms.

In total, three different individuals were filmed by the ROV at depths of around 3,900 metres (almost 2.5 miles down), with one amongst the animals appearing to perhaps be using its tentacles to anchor itself to the seabed.

"It was a fine-looking and unique organism," says oceanographer Mike Ford.

"It moved sort of a hot air balloon attached to the seafloor on two lines, maintaining a particular altitude above the seafloor. Whether it's attached to the seabed, we're unsure. We failed to observe direct attachment during the dive, but it looks like the organism touches the seafloor."

The other specimens may not are touching the seabed, but all three of the animals were spotted within two metres of it, in a very feature called the Arecibo Amphitheater, which lies within an underwater trench referred to as the Guajataca Canyon.

It's in these very deep parts of the ocean where ctenophores are found, but the acute depth of their natural habitat means we do not encounter these mysterious animals – in addition to new species – fairly often.

Ctenophores elapse variety of common names, many of which seem almost comical: comb jellies (named after their 'combs' of fine cilia) is that the most well-liked, but they need also been stated as sea gooseberries, sea walnuts, and Venus's girdles.

Digital illustrations of Duobrachium sparksae. (Nicholas Bezio).

While the animals can superficially resemble jellyfish, they're not closely related. Ctenophores, which are carnivorous, subsist on small arthropods and various forms of larvae.

Up to about 200 species are described so far, with about one new species being found annually on the average, and most discoveries depend upon video capture methods for the premise of physical descriptions, given the difficulties of collecting specimens.

"This presents somewhat of a conundrum because taxonomy relies heavily upon physical type specimens preserved in museums to function references to which other material will be compared," the researchers explain in their paper.

"Indeed, the thought of using photographic evidence to ascertain new species has been highly contentious in recent decades."

Luckily, given the high-definition footage the team got off those three fine specimens of D. sparks are, the researchers say they didn't get "any pushback" about their species discovery.

While the team hopes to gather specimens on future dives for physical analysis, they are saying it would be decades before they need the prospect to run into the invertebrate again.

For D. spark she's sake, that may be for the best: bringing a gelatinous blob up to water level, when it normally resides about 4 kilometres under the ocean's surface, maybe a messy affair.

"Even if we had the equipment, there would are little or no time to process the animal because gelatinous animals don't preserve all right," Collins says.

"Ctenophores are even worse than jellyfish during this regard."

Lose Yourself in These Gloriously Detailed New Images of The Magellanic Clouds

 

Astronomers are using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) in Chile as a form of the baby monitor, keeping their eye on a neighborhood of nearby space absolutely packed with star nurseries.

The Large and little Magellanic Clouds are the sole two dwarf galaxies visible from Earth with the unaided eye, and fortunately enough, they're also home to a number of the foremost active star-forming regions in our Local Group of galaxies.

It's not the primary time we've tried to peek in and see what these newborns are up to, but it's the foremost penetrating look yet.

The Survey of the Magellanic Stellar History (SMASH) took 50 nights of observation to map in high detail a part 2,400 times greater than the face of the total Moon. The results are breathtaking.

Images of the foremost complex regions within the Magellanic Clouds have now provided roughly 4 billion measurements of 360 million objects, which researchers hope to show into a 'home movie' for this celestial family – one that potentially goes back 13 billion years.

"These satellite galaxies are studied for many years, but SMASH is being employed to map their structure over their full, enormous extent and help solve the mystery of their formation," explains astronomer David Nidever from Montana State University.

Deepest, widest view of the Large Magellanic Cloud from SMASH. (CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/SMASH/Nideve

As gas within these clouds collapses, new stars still are rapidly born, and data from SMASH suggest this flurry of activity was initially triggered by a collision between the massive and little Magellanic galaxies way back.

Now, the 2 still orbit one another. in the future far, far within the future, astronomers think both are swallowed by our own Milky Way.

Deepest, widest view of the Small Magellanic Cloud from SMASH. (CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/SMASH/Nidever)

While the Magellanic Clouds are obtainable and rather small, mapping them intimately still requires deep and efficient imaging. The DECam – a large camera built for observing countless galaxies with the goal of understanding how dark energy pushes them apart – may be a perfect tool for also keeping an in-depth eye on these young stellar neighbors.

Using data obtained from DECam at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, astronomers have probed right to the center of the Magellanic Clouds, where many of the nurseries are found.

"Besides producing amazing images, these data allow us to appear in to the past and reconstruct how the Magellanic Clouds formed their stars over time," says astronomer Knut Olsen from us National Science Foundation.

"With these 'movies' of star formation, we will try and understand how and why these galaxies evolved."

Geologists Think They've Found an Alaskan Version of Yellowstone's Supervolcano

 Mount Cleveland sounds like the sort of volcano you made for a grade four science project and crammed with vinegar and bicarb. More geological zit than powder keg, it pops and oozes every decade about to thicken its igneous skin.

There are five more prefer it nearby, making up what's referred to as the Islands of 4 Mountains. Today, most of them are quiet. But geologists are wondering if together this innocent cluster of volcanoes off from the Alaskan mainland represents something much more Earth-shattering.

Researchers from institutions across the US are set to create their case at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) 2020 Fall Meeting, arguing that the mountains Cleveland, Carlisle, Herbert, Kagamil, Tana, and Uliaga are all tips of 1 big magma chamber.

Cone-like stratovolcanoes can blow their tops in impressive ways but tend to emerge from relatively small to modestly-sized pockets of magma.

A caldera may be a collapsed chunk of crust formed by the collapse of a magma chamber because it empties. Such a collapse is often a comparatively subtle sinking of rock crumbling into an empty hole. Under the correct conditions, bubbles of gas get caught within the viscous molten rock, forming an autoclave that sends rock flying when it erupts.

There's no single evidence as far as evidence of a hidden caldera here goes, but there are lots of hints. The make-up of certain gases escaping Mount Cleveland, as an example, and also the way vents on several of the mountains align point to the chance that a major chamber lurks deep underground.

"We've been scraping under the couch cushions for data," says Diana Roman of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC.

"But everything we glance at lines up with a caldera during this region."

If their predictions are right, Alaska's Aleutian Arc – the road of islands stretching across the sea towards Russia's coast – may well be harboring a monster on the size of Yellowstone's mighty supervolcano.

The entire chain contains around 80 volcanos in total. Dozens of them have erupted repeatedly in recent history, too, so it's no secret that it is a geologically active part of the world.

One of the foremost active volcanos within the area, Mount Cleveland has erupted quite 20 times within the past two centuries. a number of them haven't exactly been small affairs, either, with one in 1944 ranking at a 'catastrophic' level three on the volcanic explosivity index (VEI).

If a hypothetical supervolcano below were to let rip, the planet would realize it. At an 8 on the VEI, the fabric blown into the atmosphere would affect the worldwide climate for years to come back.

Just over two thousand years ago another Aleutian Arc volcano, Okmok, erupted with such ferocity it's speculated that the resulting changes to the climate half a world away could are the ultimate nail within the coffin of the Roman Republic.

The caldera beneath the Islands of 4 Mountains promises a far bigger display.

As concerning because it all sounds, there are plenty more data to assemble before we will sound any alarms.

"Our hope is to return to the Islands of 4 Mountains and appearance more closely at the seafloor, study the volcanic rocks in greater detail, collect more seismic and gravity data, and sample more of the geothermal areas," says Roman.

Even if confirmed, it'll take time to create a transparent understanding of the caldera's workings. Yellowstone's supervolcano is found during a rather convenient spot for geologists, providing much data all year round. And we're still debating just what is going on deep below Earth's skin.

Still, thoughts of apocalyptic explosions aside, knowing Mount Cleveland is tapping into a caldera could help volcanologists better understand the character of its eruptions. With plumes pushing quite five kilometers (3 miles) into the air, there's the threat to air therein a part of the globe to consider.

"It does potentially help us understand what makes Cleveland so active," says lead author John Power,  a researcher with the US Geological Survey at the Alaska Volcano Observatory.

"It may help us understand what kind of eruptions to expect within the future and better indurate their hazards."

World's Largest Atom Smasher May Have Just Found Evidence for Why Our Universe Exists

 For the primary time ever, physicists at the world’s largest particle accelerator have observed differences within the decay of particles and antiparticles containing a basic building block of matter, called the quark.

The finding could help explain the mystery of why matter exists in the least.

"It's a historic milestone," said Sheldon Stone, a professor of physics at Syracuse University and one among the collaborators on the new research.

Matter and antimatter

Every particle of matter has an antiparticle, which is identical in mass but with an opposite electrical charge. When matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate each other. That's a controversy. the massive Bang should have created a constant amount of matter and antimatter, and every one of these particles should have destroyed one another rapidly, leaving nothing behind but pure energy.

Clearly, that did not happen. Instead, about 1 in a very billion quarks (the elementary particles that compose protons and neutrons) survived. Thus, the universe exists. What meaning is that particles and antiparticles must not behave entirely identically, Stone told Live Science. they ought to instead decay at slightly different rates, with an imbalance between matter and antimatter. Physicists call that difference in behavior the charge-parity (CP) violation.

The notion of the CP violation came from Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov, who proposed it in 1967 as evidence for why matter survived the massive Bang.

"This is one amongst the standards necessary for us to exist," Stone said, "so it's reasonably important to know what the origin of CP violation is."

There are six differing types of quarks, all with their own properties: up and down, top and bottom, and charm and strange. In 1964, physicists first observed the CP violation in reality in strange quarks. In 2001, they saw it happen with particles containing bottom quarks. (Both discoveries led to Nobel prizes for the researchers involved.) Physicists had long theorized that it happened with particles containing charm quarks, too, but nobody had ever seen it.

Stone is one in every one of the researchers on the massive Hadron Collider (LHC) beauty experiment, which uses CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the 16.5-mile (27 kilometers) ring on the French-Swiss border that sends subatomic particles careening into each other to re-create the flashes of mind-boggling energy that followed the large Bang. because the particles smash into one another, they forced the lock their constituent parts, which then decay within fractions of a second to more stable particles.

The latest observations involved combinations of quarks called mesons, specifically the D0 ("d-zero") meson and also the anti-D0 meson. The D0 meson is formed of one quark and one anti-up quark (the antiparticle of the up quark). The anti-D0 meson could be a combination of 1 anti-charm quark and one quark.

Both of those mesons decay in many ways, but a small percentage of them find themselves as mesons called kaons or pions. The researchers measured the difference in decay rates between the D0 and also the anti-D0 mesons, a process that involved taking indirect measurements to make sure they weren't just measuring a difference within the initial production of the 2 mesons, or differences in how well their equipment could detect various subatomic particles.

The bottom line? The ratios of decay differed by a tenth of a percent.

"The means the D0 and also the anti-D0 don't decay at the identical rate, and that is what we call CP violation," Stone said.

And that makes things interesting. The differences within the decays probably aren't sufficiently big to elucidate what happened after the large Bang to depart behind such a lot matter, Stone said, though it's large enough to be surprising. But now, he said, physics theorists get their turn with the information.

Physicists depend on something called the quality Model to elucidate, well, everything at the subatomic scale. The question now, Stone said, is whether or not the predictions made by the quality Model can explain the quark measurement the team just made, or if it'll require some type of new physics — which, Stone said, would be the foremost exciting outcome.

"If this might only be explained by new physics, that new physics could contain the concept of where this CP violation is coming from," he said.

Weird AI Hoax Paper Claims That There’s a Black Hole At The Center of Earth

 

A strange report surfaced recently in an exceedingly medical journal and its observers absolutely baffling. crammed with incredible claims a few regions in the middle of the planet can be altering human genetics, the paper has been dismissed as a hoax. But is that each one there's to it?

Entitled “Apart from at the middle of Earth Plays the Role of the most important System of Telecommunication for Connecting DNAs, Dark DNAs and Molecules of Water on 4+N- Dimensional Manifold,” the initial paper in question was published by 13 different authors within the Open Access Macedonian Journal of life sciences.

In the paper’s abstract, things get weird right from the beginning.

“Recently, some scientists from NASA have claimed that there could also be a part like structure at the center of the planet,” it begins.

Additional papers began to surface with similarly outlandish claims. as an example, one stated:

“The earth’s core is that the biggest system of telecommunication which exchanges waves with all DNAs and molecules of water. Imaging of DNAs on the inside of the metal of the core produces a DNA black brane around 109 times longer than the core of the world which is compacted and creates a structure just like a region or black brane. we've shown that this DNA black brane is that the main reason for the warm temperature of core and magnetic of the earth.”

Another paper asserts, “First group couple to our universe from one side and produce matters like some genes of DNAs and couple to an anti-universe from another side with opposite sign and make anti-matters like some anti-genes of anti-DNAs.”

Since the publication, Macedonian Journal of Medical Science, isn't well-known, and also the papers haven't been peer-reviewed, it might appear that the journal was subject to an elaborate prank that exposed a shoddy editorial pipeline. But others believe this could transcend a hoax or a conspiratorial satire; analysts on Twitter have suggested a gaggle of scientists used these publications to check the peer-review system of the journal–an activity called “peer-review-tricking,” which can involve advanced sorts of algorithmic computing.

Others wondered whether or not the publisher is, in fact, a “predatory journal,” or a publication that feigns having a peer-review process, while it'll publish articles and papers for profit.

According to IFLSCIENCE! one of the authors, Torello Lotti, previously authored a paper about predatory journals. there's speculation that new advanced text-generation algorithms like GPT-2 and GPT-3, which have astounded technology reporters with their abilities, could are accustomed create a shot balloon article to work out if it can pass the smell test of professional publication.

In addition to the part claims, the odd papers assert the following:

“Each DNA has two parts which one are often seen on the four-dimensional universe, and another one has existed in extra dimensions, and only it’s e_ects is observed.”

“This dark a part of DNA called as a dark DNA in an additional dimension.”

The followup paper is entitled “Formation of Neural Circuits in an exceedingly Expanded Version of Darwin’s Theory: Effects of DNAs in Extra Dimensions and within the Earth’s Core on Neural Networks” and discusses “stringy black anti-DNA” and “radiated signals of neural circuits in a chick embryo.”

So, what's happening here? Trolling, a decent old-fashioned hoax (that could, unfortunately, help to further cast doubts on scientific papers), or an odd AI experiment?