'Sun at its quietest for 100 years'
Updated on 21 April 2009
With fewer sunspots and solar flares, the sun is at its quietest for almost a century.
Scientists believe the conditions provide a new opportunity to study the sun's confusing cycle of activity.
Space telescopes can be used during the extended "solar minimum" to study the sun in more detail than ever before.
More than 1,000 astronomers and space scientists have gathered at the University of Hertfordshire for the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science, where they are discussing the issue.
The sun normally undergoes an 11-year cycle. At its peak the sun shoots out flares, gases and materials, and dozens of sunspots can be seen. It then goes through a period of calm. Scientists have little idea why these cycles happen, how they affect the earth and when the current low will end.
Sunspots - areas of intense magnetic fields that form on the sun's surface - are the easiest way of measuring solar activity. The number of sunspots in recent months has been the lowest since 1913. There has also been a 50-year low in solar wind pressure and a 55-year low in radio emissions.
Dr Jim Wild, who studies links between the earth and sun at Lancaster University, said: "The sun has these periods where its activity goes from being very active to being very quiet and we've known about these cycles for hundreds of year but this time the solar minimum is lasting longer than it usually does and it's a bit deeper.
"It's part of the usual trend but at the same time it's a bit different. It's probably the quietest it has been for about a hundred years.
"Nobody really understands what controls these cycles and the variation between the cycles. Because it is very quiet this is the first chance we have had to use state of the art diagnosis to study what is going on. We can study the sun as never before."
Speaking from the conference, he added: "Nobody has their head in their hands thinking we're all doomed."
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