Something big is about to happen on the sun. According to measurements from NASA-supported observatories, the sun's vast magnetic field is about to flip.

It looks like we're no more than 3 to 4 months away from a complete field reversal," says solar physicist Todd Hoeksema of Stanford University. "This change will have ripple effects throughout the solar system."

The sun's magnetic field changes polarity approximately every 11 years. It happens at the peak of each solar cycle as the sun's inner magnetic dynamo re-organizes itself. The coming reversal will mark the midpoint of Solar Cycle 24. Half of 'Solar Max' will be behind us, with half yet to come.

The sun's polar magnetic fields weaken, go to zero, and then emerge again with the opposite polarity. This is a regular part of the solar cycle." A reversal of the sun's magnetic field is, literally, a big event.

During field reversals, the current sheet becomes very wavy. As Eart…

Something is up with the sun.In case you haven’t heard about it, a huge portion of the sun’s corona has gone missing.

It has begun to behave very erratically, and scientists don't know quite what to make of it. Sunspot activity appears to be slowing down with each new cycle and absolutely gigantic holes have started to appear in the sun.

At the moment, the sun is approaching the peak of its 11 year cycle, and an increasing number of scientists are becoming concerned about what the next cycle will bring.

It is a fact that the current solar cycle 24 has been the weakest in 100 years. In 2009, a panel of forecasters led by NOAA predicted a below-average peak. Now that Solar Max has arrived, however, it is even weaker than they expected.

It may be premature to declare Solar Cycle 24 underwhelming.

Solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center thinks Solar Cycle 24 is double peaked -- and the second peak is yet to come.

Also, weak solar cycles have been known to prod…

NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, recently mapped the boundaries of the solar system's tail, called the heliotail.

By combining observations from the first three years of IBEX imagery, scientists have mapped out a tail that shows a combination of fast and slow moving particles.

The entire structure twisted, because it experiences the pushing and pulling of magnetic fields outside the solar system.

Solar activity will continue to increase as the solar cycle progresses toward solar maximum, expected in the 2013 time frame.

Despite 4 X-solar flares last month and a M5.9 solar flare on June 7, the sun shows little activity at the moment.

The sunspot number may be low, but the sun is far from blank. Amateur astronomers monitoring the sun report a large number of magnetic filaments snaking across the solar disk.

Weird filaments are popping up all over the solar surface and each one has a unique shape and length.

The longest one, in the sun's southern hemisphere stretches, more than 400,000 km from end to end.

If any of the filaments collapses, it could hit the stellar surface and explode, producing a Hyder flare.

The two videos show remarkable and strange activities and unknown objects around the sun which may be related to the increased number of magnetic filaments. The recordings show activities of the past two weeks.

NASA is now predicting that the Sun may generate unpreceden…

Comet Lemmon (C/2012 F6), which is receding from the sun not far beyond the orbit of Earth, has just experienced a "disconnection event."

A cloud of dusty plasma is propagating down the comet's tail, shown here in a photo taken by Paul Mortfield on May 15th:


Disconnection events can be caused by CME impacts. A famous example is that of Comet Encke in 2007.

Comet Lemmon, however, is not on the same side of the sun as active sunspot AR1748. It's hard to see how the recent X-flares can be responsible. Nevertheless, solar activity is high and comets are very sensitive to stormy space weather.

Comet Encke

On April 20, 2007, the comet Encke had just dipped inside the orbit of Mercury, perilously close to the sun, when a solar eruption struck and literally tore the comet's tail off.

NASA's STEREO-A probe recorded a fantastic movie of the collision.


The eruption that hit Encke was a CME or "coronal mass ejection.

CMEs are fast-moving and massive, packing billions…

Something unexpected is happening on the sun.

2013 is supposed to be the year of Solar Max, the peak of the 11-year sunspot cycle. Yet 2013 has arrived and solar activity is relatively low. Sunspot numbers are well below their values in 2011, and strong solar flares have been infrequent for many months.

The quiet has led some observers to wonder if forecasters missed the mark. Solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center has a different explanation: "This is solar maximum," he suggests. "But it looks different from what we expected because it is double peaked."

Conventional wisdom holds that solar activity swings back and forth like a simple pendulum. At one end of the cycle, there is a quiet time with few sunspots and flares. At the other end, Solar Max brings high sunspot numbers and solar storms. It’s a regular rhythm that repeats every 11 years.

Reality, however, is more complicated. Astronomers have been counting sunspots for centuries,…