A recent report by NASA and ESA announces for the2012 themost powerful solar storm of the last fifty years. As predicted by the team led by Mausumi Dikpati, from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), “the next solar cycle will be 30 to 50% more intense than the previous one.”
Solar activity undergoes periodic ups and downs, and in the last two years it has experienced the period of lowest activity in remembrance. But, in the case of the Sun, after the calm comes the storm. As astronomers have found, with increasing frequency smallSunspotsthat announce the beginning ofnext solar cycle, which is estimated to have its maximum between 2012 and 2013.
In the 18th century, the Swiss astronomer Rudolf Wolf developed a method for counting sunspots that is still used today. Wolf studied solar cycles in periods of eleven years, and called “cycle 1” to the first one he analyzed (17551766). Since then, the following have been numbered consecutively. The next one, which will have its solar maximum in 2012 or 2013, will be thecycle 24.
If Dikpati’s predictions are correct, in the next few years there will be a burst of solar activity slightly less than that of the historic solar maximum of 1958. During that year the northern lights were seen in Mexico, but it had no major consequences. However, researchers now assume that a solar maximum of similar intensity to that couldseriously damage satellites, electrical networks, mobile phone networks, GPS systems and other modern technologies.
