Astronomers have identified another star going through its own Maunder Minimum period—just like our Sun.
after European astronomers developed the first telescopes at the start of the 17th century, they observed dark spots speckling the Sun’s surface. They also handed their modern successors a mystery. From about 1645 to 1715, the spots, now known to be indicators of solar activity, all but disappeared.
Scientists have known for decades that our Sun’s activity surges and ebbs on a roughly 11-year cycle, which corresponds to how often its magnetic poles flip their orientation. During a solar maximum, sunspots proliferate, marking weak points in the magnetic field, where plasma from the Sun’s atmosphere can lash out in violent loops. Astronomers have spotted young Sun-like stars with similar cycles, and older ones that have totally stable activity.
Baum thought at first she’d made an error; perhaps the observatories were even looking at two different stars. But earlier this year, her colleagues came across additional observations that filled in the data gap, capturing the star’s emissions as it switched from active to quiet. The recovered data set “hit the jackpot,” says Jacob Luhn, an astronomer at the University of California, Irvine, and lead author on the preprint.
The theory predicts that this transition state will emerge in middle-aged stars—just like our Sun and this newly identified napping star. “Everything about this discovery has actually corroborated what we’ve been talking about for the last 5 years,” Metcalfe says. “We definitely knew about stars that were not cycling, but we didn’t know how they got there—this is like the missing link in that evolutionary picture.
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