Scientists Capture Incredibly Rare Footage of Deep-Sea Fish Devouring a Whole Shark

 Feasts are rare on the barren landscape of the ocean depths. So researchers couldn't believe their luck after they chanced on a feeding frenzy of deep-sea sharks chowing down on a fallen swordfish off the US coast in July 2019.

But they never imagined they might also capture footage of 1 of these sharks becoming the prey for an additional deep-sea creature.

With their rover hovering nearby, a late arrival took advantage of the submersible's shadow. Nobody might blame a wary fish for holding back while ravenous sharks feed, but this heavyweight had plans to show one amongst the diners into its dinner.

A video posted by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows the aftermath of the ambush by a hungry wreckfish. you'll watch it for yourself within the clip below, with shark lunch being served at around 1:42.

The action materialized at a depth of about 450 metres (roughly 1,480 ft) near an increase within the seafloor 130 kilometres (80 miles) off the coast of South Carolina.

While scouting for the wreck of the tanker SS Bloody Marsh, NOAA's remotely operated vehicle Deep Discoverer chanced upon the remains of a 2.5 metre (8 ft) long swordfish being chewed on by nearly a dozen deep-sea sharks.

"The reason behind the death of this majestic animal is unclear, perhaps as a result of age, disease, or another injury," says marine scientist Peter J. Auster from the University of Connecticut.

"There was no visible hook or trail of cord suggesting this was a lost catch. However, any variety of injury would are masked by the huge damage caused by many shark bites."

The sharks were two species of slow-moving, deep-sea dogfish commonly spoken as sleeper sharks. Two of the larger individuals were likely to be rough skin dogfish (Centroscymnus owstonii).

Others belonged to a comparatively newly discovered animal: Genie's dogfish (Squalus clarkae), named in honour of Mote Marine Laboratory founder Eugenie 'Shark Lady' Clark in 2018.

Both of the sleeper shark species are commonly found at these types of depths, sluggishly cruising about until some morsel happens by. Or, as during this case, happens to precipitate like manna from heaven somewhere within the area.

Sniffing out food on the currents, or perhaps detecting the vibrations of earlier arrivals, it's believed they might have journeyed from far just to stock up on the food drop.

Whatever attracted the scavengers, it wasn't long before what looks to be a solitary trouble Atlantic wreckfish (Polyprion americanus) also homed in on the scene for a simple meal.

These massive fish also are named as sea bass and bass gropers. they will exceed 2 metres (about 7 feet) long and typically hang around trouble caves and shipwrecks.

Whether it came for the daily special but stayed for the party isn't clear. But because the feast continued, the wreckfish emerged from the glare of the Deep Discover's lights to wrap its lips around one amongst the sharks.

"This rare and startling event leaves us with more questions than answers, but such is that the nature of scientific exploration," says Auster.

Astronomers Just Found Cosmic 'Superhighways' For Fast Travel Through The Solar System

 Invisible structures generated by gravitational interactions within the scheme have created a "space superhighway" network, astronomers have discovered.

These channels enable the fast travel of objects through space and will be harnessed for our own space exploration purposes, moreover because of the study of comets and asteroids.

By applying analyses to both observational and simulation data, a team of researchers led by Nataša Todorović of Belgrade Astronomical Observatory in Serbia observed that these superhighways encompass a series of connected arches inside these invisible structures, called space manifolds - and every planet generates its own manifolds, together creating what the researchers have called "a true celestial autobahn".

This network can transport objects from Jupiter to Neptune in an exceedingly matter of decades, instead of them for much longer timescales, on the order of many thousands to voluminous years, normally found within the scheme.

Finding hidden structures in space is not easy, but watching the way things move around can provide helpful clues. specifically, comets and asteroids.

There are several groups of rocky bodies at different distances from the Sun. There's the Jupiter-family comets (JFCs), those with orbits of but 20 years, that do not go farther than Jupiter's orbital paths.

Centaurs are icy chunks of rocks that hang around between Jupiter and Neptune. and also the trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) are those within the far reaches of the scheme, with orbits larger than that of Neptune.

To model the pathways connecting these zones, as TNOs transition through the Centaur category and find yourself as JFCs, timescales can range from 10,000 to a billion years. But a recent paper identified an orbital gateway connected to Jupiter that seems much quicker, governing the paths of JFCs and Centaurs.

Although that paper didn't mention Lagrange points, it's known that these regions of relative gravitational stability, created by the interaction between two orbiting bodies (in this case, Jupiter and therefore the Sun), can generate manifolds. So Todorović and her team set about investigating.

They employed a tool called the fast Lyapunov indicator (FLI), usually wont to detect chaos. Since chaos within the scheme is linked to the existence of stable and unstable manifolds, on short timescales, the FLI can capture traces of manifolds, both stable and unstable, of the dynamical model it's applied to.

"Here," the researchers wrote in their paper, "we use the FLI to detect the presence and global structure of space manifolds, and capture instabilities that act on orbital time scales; that's, we use this sensitive and well-established numerical tool to more generally define regions of fast transport within the scheme."

They collected numerical data on numerous orbits within the system and computed how these orbits fit with known manifolds, modeling the perturbations generated by seven major planets, from Venus to Neptune.

And they found that the foremost prominent arches, at increasing heliocentric distances, were linked with Jupiter; and most strongly with its Lagrange point manifolds. All Jovian close encounters, modeled using test particles, visited the vicinity of Jupiter's first and second Lagrange points.

A few dozen roughly particles were then flung into the earth on a collision course; but an enormous number more, around 2,000, became uncoupled from their orbits around the Sun to enter hyperbolic escape orbits. On average, these particles reached Uranus and Neptune 38 and 46 years later, respectively, with the fastest reaching Neptune in under a decade.

The majority - around 70 percent - reached a distance of 100 astronomical units (Pluto's average orbital distance is 39.5 astronomical units) in but a century.

Jupiter's huge influence isn't a large surprise. Jupiter is, except for the Sun, the foremost massive object within the scheme. But the identical structures would be generated by all the planets, on timescales commensurate with their orbital periods, the researchers found.

This new understanding could help us better understand how comets and asteroids move around the inner scheme and their potential threat to Earth. And, of course, there's the aforementioned benefit to future scheme exploration missions.

But we might have to urge a stronger fix on how these gateways work, to avoid those collision courses; and it won't be easy.

"More detailed quantitative studies of the discovered phase-space structures … could provide deeper insight into the transport between the 2 belts of minor bodies and also the planet region," the researchers wrote in their paper.

"Combining observations, theory, and simulation will improve our current understanding of this short-term mechanism functioning on the TNO, Centaur, comet, and asteroid populations and merge this information with the normal picture of the long-term chaotic diffusion through orbital resonances; a formidable task for the big range of energies considered."

New Evidence Supports Controversial Claim of Humans in The Americas 130,000 Years Ago

 Three years ago, a team of archaeologists within u.  s. proposed a rare idea: the primary human settlers within the Americas received least 100,000 years previous we thought.

The evidence came from a set of mastodon bones and ancient stones dating back to around 130,000 years ago, which perceived to are hammered and scraped by early humans. 

The remains were found within the suburbs of the point of entry within the 1990s, and therefore the researchers think that the nearby stones may are used as hammers and anvils to figure on the bones. But outside of that, no other traces of human action were found.

Today, the Cerutti Mastodon (CM) site remains one of the foremost controversial archaeological digs within the world. For years, scientists are going back and forth over the results and whether or not they indicate the presence of humans in North America 130,000 years ago, but the first authors aren't let go. 

The team has now published a follow-up paper that claims to possess found traces of ancient mastodon bones on the upward-facing sides of two cobblestones collected from the location. 

According to the paper, mastodon bones were indeed placed on top of those rocky 'anvils' and struck with some variety of hammers - presumably by humans.

If the bones were merely in passive contact with the rocks, you'd expect to determine their influence everywhere they were touching, not just the highest part. 

There also doesn't appear to be any modern contamination, the authors add. the traditional artifacts were found near a road work site, so some critics think the bones were broken and scraped by the activity of trucks and other similar disturbances.

While this can be much possible, researchers say it doesn't explain the residue on the stones.

When collecting bones and stones from the positioning, the team in the urban center claims to own taken care. they are saying there was no opportunity for bone material to disintegrate or "float" into the air and onto a stone at the initial site or within the lab afterward.

Even within the soil, bone residues from these mastodons were discovered at much lower concentrations than what was measured on some parts of the cobblestones.

"Fossil bone residues documented with the Raman microscope were only found in residue extractions sampled from the doubtless used surfaces and are therefore considered to be more likely use-related," the authors write.

"As our investigations have indicated that the bone residues are less likely to originate from sediments or contact with bones within the bone bed as discussed above, the foremost parsimonious explanation is that the residues (and wear) derive from deliberate contact with bone. We consider this scenario to be the foremost likely." 

Still, there's one key missing ingredient: collagen. this can be a very important part of mammal bones, and if stones were wont to break apart the mastodon skeleton, you'd expect to search out some traces of collagen.

It's very possible that the collagen during this case had already disintegrated from the passing of your time. Or it might be that measurements simply didn't acquire its presence.

But archaeologist Gary Haynes, who wasn't involved in the study, told Science News he thinks the more likely scenario is that road work vehicles buried these stones next to the mastodon bones, long after their collagen had disappeared.

He's not the sole one who's skeptical. Today, most evidence suggests human settlers arrived within the Americas roughly 14,000 to 20,000 years ago. A date of 130,000 years is kind of the claim, and it requires extraordinary evidence, which some scientists argue is lacking.

A rebuttal to the initial 2017 paper argued that other processes outside of human hammering produced the bone damage, especially from heavy construction equipment.

Even before humans came along there was probably disturbance within the area. Over time, as fluvial deposits slowly covered the remains, these mastodon bones would have remained somewhat flexible, and this implies they might are trampled, displaced, fractured, abraded, and reoriented by other mammals that used the traditional muddy watercourse.

"The extraordinary claim by Holen et al. of prehistoric hominin involvement at the CM site shouldn't be dependant on evidence that's receptive multiple, contrasting interpretations," the authors of the rebuttal argue.

"Until unambiguous evidence of hominin activities is presented, like formal stone tools or an abundance of percussion pits, caution requires us to line aside from the claims of Holen et al. of prehistoric hominin activities at the CM site."

Shortly afterward, the first authors wrote a rebuttal to the rebuttal. In it, they argued that there's no evidence of fluvial deposits in which the bones were broken before they were buried and not trampled afterward.

"Healthy skepticism is that the foundation of excellent science, and also the publication of this discovery is that the beginning of a scientific debate, which I welcome and encourage,"  Tom Deméré, a paleontologist at the port of entry explanation Museum and one in all the initial authors, argued some years ago.

"What I didn't expect was the reluctance of scientists to have interaction in a very two-way conversation to objectively evaluate our hypothesis." 

Archaeologist David Meltzer from Southern Methodist University is skeptical but receptive the controversy. He says he can be convinced that humans arrived within the Americas a 100,000 years previous we thought, but that he hasn't seen enough evidence yet. 

"Given everything we all know, it makes no sense," he told Nature in 2018. "You're not visiting flip people's opinion 180 degrees unless you have absolutely unimpeachable evidence, and this ain't it."

Perhaps this new bout of evidence will help clear up a number of that doubt. More likely than not, however, it'll merely trigger a series of latest rebuttals.

Physicists Suggest All Matter May Be Made Up of Energy 'Fragments'

 The matter is what makes up the Universe, but what makes up matter? This question has long been tricky for people who consider it – especially for the physicists.

Reflecting recent trends in physics, my colleague Jeffrey Eischen and that I have described an updated thanks to giving some thought to the matter. We propose that matter isn't made from particles or waves, as was long thought, but – more fundamentally – that matter is created of fragments of energy.

From five to 1

The ancient Greeks conceived of 5 building blocks of matter – from bottom to top: earth, water, air, fire, and aether. Aether was the matter that filled the heavens and explained the rotation of the celebs, as observed from the planet viewpoint.

These were the primary most elementary elements from which one could build up a world. Their conceptions of the physical elements didn't change dramatically for nearly 2,000 years.

Then, about 300 years ago, Sir mathematician introduced the concept that every one matter exists at points called particles. 100 fifty years afterward, James Clerk Maxwell introduced the radiation – the underlying and infrequently invisible type of magnetism, electricity, and light-weight.

The particle served because the building blocks for mechanics and also the wave for electromagnetism – and therefore the public settled on the particle and also the wave because of the two building blocks of matter. Together, the particles and waves became the building blocks of all types of matter.

This was an unlimited improvement over the traditional Greeks' five elements but was still flawed. in a very famous series of experiments, referred to as the double-slit experiments, light sometimes acts sort of a particle and at other times acts sort of a wave. And while the theories and math of waves and particles allow scientists to form incredibly accurate predictions about the Universe, the foundations break down at the biggest and tiniest scales.

Einstein proposed a remedy in his theory of general relativity theory. Using the mathematical tools available to him at the time, Einstein was ready to better explain certain physical phenomena and also resolve a longstanding paradox referring to inertia and gravity.

But rather than improving on particles or waves, he eliminated them as he proposed the warping of space and time.

Using newer mathematical tools, my colleague and that i have demonstrated a brand new theory that will accurately describe the Universe. rather than basing the idea on the warping of space and time, we considered that there might be a building block that's more fundamental than the particle and therefore the wave.

Scientists understand that particles and waves are existential opposites: A particle could be a source of matter that exists at one point, and waves exist everywhere except at the points that make them.

My colleague and that I thought it made logical sense for there to be an underlying connection between them.

Flow and fragments of energy

Our theory begins with a replacement fundamental idea – that energy always "flows" through regions of space and time.

Think of energy as made from lines that replenish a locality of space and time, flowing into and out of that region, never beginning, never-ending, and never crossing each other.

Working from the concept of a universe of flowing energy lines, we hunted for one building block for the flowing energy. If we could find and define such a thing, we hoped we could use it to accurately make predictions about the Universe at the biggest and tiniest scales.

There were many building blocks to decide on from mathematically, but we sought one that had the features of both the particle and wave – concentrated just {like the} particle but also opened up over space and time like the wave.

The answer was a building block that appears sort of a concentration of energy – reasonably sort of a star – having energy that's highest at the middle, which gets smaller farther aloof from the middle.

Much to our surprise, we discovered that there have been only a limited number of the way to explain the amount of energy that flows. Of those, we found only 1 that works in accordance with our mathematical definition of flow.

We named it a fraction of energy. For the mathematics and physics aficionados, it's defined as A = -⍺/r where ⍺ is intensity and r is that the distance function.

Using the fragment of energy as a building block of matter, we then constructed the mathematics necessary to unravel physics problems. the ultimate step was to check it out.

Back to Einstein, adding universality

More than 100 ago, Einstein had turned to 2 legendary problems in physics to validate general relativity: the ever-so-slight yearly shift – or precession – in Mercury's orbit, and therefore the tiny bending of sunshine because it passes the Sun.

These problems were at the 2 extremes of the scale spectrum. Neither wave nor particle theories of matter could solve them, but the general theory of relativity did.

The theory of Einstein's theory of relativity warped space and time in such a way on cause the trajectory of Mercury to shift and lightweight to bend in barely the amounts seen in astronomical observations.

If our new theory was to possess an opportunity at replacing the particle and also the wave with the presumably more fundamental fragment, we might just be ready to solve these problems with our theory, too.

For the precession-of-Mercury problem, we modeled the Sun as an unlimited stationary fragment of energy and Mercury as a smaller but still enormous slow-moving fragment of energy. For the bending-of-light problem, the Sun was modeled the identical way, but the photon was modeled as a minuscule fragment of energy moving at the speed of sunshine.

In both problems, we calculated the trajectories of the moving fragments and got identical answers as those predicted by the speculation of relativity theory. We were stunned.

Our initial work demonstrated how a brand new building block is capable of accurately modeling bodies from the large to the minuscule. Where particles and waves break down, the fragment of energy building block held strong.

The fragment can be one potentially universal building block from which to model reality mathematically – and update the way people give some thought to the building blocks of the Universe.

One of The Blackest Planets in The Galaxy Is Headed For a Fiery Death

 WASP-12b is one in every of the more interesting exoplanets we all know of. Orbiting a plant disease star a bit bigger than the Sun 1,410 light-years away, the ultra-black planet is what's called a "hot Jupiter" - a superior planet exoplanet with similar mass and size to Jupiter, but so near the star that it's scorching hot.

WASP-12b has never exactly been within the most secure position. With an orbital period of just over each day, the Jovian planet exoplanet is so near its star that a continuing stream of fabric is being siphoned removed from its atmosphere.

But its death won't necessarily be by slow stellar slurping. Careful observations have found it is also on a noticeably decaying orbit. And, consistent with new research, that orbit is decaying a touch faster than we initially thought.

Rather than the three.25 million years initially estimated, WASP-12b will meet its fiery end in mere 2.9 million years.

According to current models of planet formation, technically hot Jupiters shouldn't exist. A Jovian planet can't form that near a star because the gravity, radiation, and intense stellar winds should keep the gas from clumping together. But they are doing exist - several hundred are identified within the exoplanet data.

However they form, hot Jupiters that are particularly near their star are a number of the foremost studied exoplanets out there. this can be because they will tell us lots about the tidal interactions between a planet and a star.

WASP-12b is among the closest hot Jupiters to its star. And it has been a superb example for studying tidal interactions.

It was discovered in 2008, which implies astronomers are able to collect a comparatively long-term dataset; and its short orbit means we are able to observe plenty of transits. That's when the exoplanet passes between us and therefore the star, causing the latter's light to ever slightly dim.

It was in 2017 that astronomers noticed something strange about WASP-12b's transits. They were occurring just a fraction of a second off once they should are, supported previous measurements of the orbital period.

That slight timing variation could are the results of the exoplanet's orbit changing direction, so a team of astronomers led by Samuel Yee of Princeton University decided to closely examine not just the transits, but the occultations when the exoplanet passes behind the star. If WASP-12b was changing direction, the occultations should be slightly delayed.

A transit causes a faint dimming of the star's light; an occultation causes an excellent fainter dimming. this is often because the exoplanet, reflecting the star's heat and light-weight, adds to the system's overall brightness when it is not behind the star.

WASP-12b is extremely dark, optically; it absorbs 94 percent of all light that shines on that, making it blacker than asphalt.

Astronomers believe that this can be because the exoplanet is so hot; at 2,600 degrees Celsius (4,700 degrees Fahrenheit) on its dayside, hydrogen molecules are diminished into atomic hydrogen, causing its atmosphere to behave more sort of a low-mass star. But because it is so hot, it glows in infrared.

Yee's team used the Spitzer Space Telescope to do to look at occultations. Although they observed the star, WASP 12, for 16 orbital periods, they only managed to seek out four faint occultations within the data. it absolutely was enough, though.

These occultations may be matched to transits… and therefore the researchers found that the occultations were occurring more quickly - in keeping with an orbital decay of 29 milliseconds p.a.. At that rate, the planet's lifespan was, the astronomers calculated, around 3.25 million years.

Now, a brand new team of researchers led by Jake Turner of the university has a probe for signs of orbital decay during a different dataset - observations taken by NASA's planet-hunting telescope TESS, specifically designed to watch transits and occultations.

TESS studied the region of the sky that included WASP-12 from 24 December 2019 to twenty January 2020. during this data, the team found 21 transits. The occultations were too shallow to be detected individually, but the team was able to model them to search out a best-fit for the TESS data.

These transit and occultation times were combined with the sooner data for timing analysis. And Turner and his team were ready to confirm that WASP-12b's orbit is indeed decaying. But it's doing so a touch faster than we thought - at a rate of 32.53 milliseconds per annum, for a complete lifespan of two.9 million years.

That looks like an extended time, but on cosmic timescales, it's practically an eyeblink. And it's dramatically shortened the exoplanet's lifespan from the estimated 10 million years it might deem the world to die from atmospheric stripping.

But, although it doesn't have long to measure, studying WASP-12b has the potential to show us lots. And while it is the only exoplanet that we've got robust evidence of orbital decay, there are other hot Jupiter exoplanets that are expected to exhibit similar rates of orbital decay.

"Hence, additional data could reveal whether [these exoplanets] indeed exhibit hitherto undetected tidal decay or whether the theoretical predictions must be improved," Turner and his team wrote.

"Timing observations of additional systems are warranted because they assist us to understand the formation, evolution, and supreme fate of hot Jupiters."

China Claims It's Achieved 'Quantum Supremacy' With The World's Fastest Quantum Computer

 A team of Chinese scientists has developed the foremost powerful quantum computer within the world, capable of engaging at least one task 100 trillion times faster than the world's fastest supercomputers.

In 2019, Google said it had built the primary machine to attain "quantum supremacy," the primary to outperform the world's best supercomputers at quantum calculation, Live Science previously reported. (IBM disputed Google's claim at the time.)

The Chinese team, based primarily at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, reported their quantum computer, named Jiuzhang, is 10 billion times faster than Google's. an outline of Jiuzhang and its feat of calculation was published December 3 within the journal Science.

Assuming both claims interference, Jiuzhang would be the second quantum computer to realize quantum supremacy anywhere within the world.

China has invested heavily in quantum computing, with Xi Jinping's government spending US$10 billion on the country's National Laboratory for Quantum Information Sciences, NDTV reported.

The country is additionally a world leader in quantum networking, where data encoded using quantum physics is transmitted across great distances, as Live Science has reported.

Quantum computers can exploit the weird mathematics governing the quantum world to outperform classical computers on certain tasks, as Live Science reported.

Where classical computers perform calculations using bits, which may have one amongst two states (typically represented by a 1 or a 0), quantum bits, or qubits, can exist in many countries simultaneously. this permits them to unravel problems more quickly than classical computers.

But while the theories predicting that quantum computing would beat classical computing are around for many years, building practical quantum computers has proved far more challenging. 

The Chinese computer makes its calculations (limited to particular questions about the behavior of sunshine particles) using optical circuits.

Google's device, Sycamore, uses superconducting materials on a chip and more nearly resembles the fundamental structure of classical computers.

Neither would be particularly useful on its own as a computer and therefore the Chinese device was built to unravel only one kind of problem.

To test Jiuzhang, the researchers assigned it a "Gaussian boson sampling" (GBS) task, where the pc calculates the output of a fancy circuit that uses light. That output is expressed as a listing of numbers. (Light is formed of particles referred to as photons, which belongs to a category of particles called bosons.) 

Success is measured in terms of the number of photons detected. Jiuzhaigou, which itself is an optical circuit, detected a maximum of 76 photons in one test and a mean of 43 across several tests.

Its calculation time to provide the list of numbers for every experimental run was about 200 seconds, while the fastest Chinese supercomputer, TaihuLight, would have taken 2.5 billion years to gain an identical result.

That suggests the quantum computer can do GBS 100 trillion times faster than a classical supercomputer.

This doesn't mean that China includes a fully practical quantum computer yet, in keeping with Xinhua. China's device is specialized and mostly useful as a tool for doing GBS. But it is a major milestone on the way there.

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."