Experts find 1,000,000km hole in the sun ‘shaped like inverted number one’

Russian space boffins have spotted a huge hole in the sun that they reckon is sending a high-speed solar wind straight at us and could trigger a magnetic storm

The sun currently has a huge coronal hole, or sunspot, that could trigger magnetic storms on Earth, say Russian experts. The hole is shaped like an inverted number 1 and is about 1 million kilometres high.

As the spot is facing us, the boffins believe it’s causing a high-speed solar wind stream that’s currently heading towards our planet. Specialists at the Pushkov Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radiowave Propagation of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IZMIRAN) link the hole to a cycle of “solar minimums”, which come every 11 years.

The next one is due in 2029-30, so we can expect a rise in dark spots on the sun before they start to decline.

These holes picked up at the start of last year, right after the peak of the solar cycle. The huge dark spot now facing us also gaped at us from December 21 to 27 last year.

While it had a different shape back then, the hole was about the same size: about 1 million kilometres and bigger than the solar radius of about 700,000 kilometres.

Boffins at the Laboratory of Solar Astronomy of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences expect magnetic storms to pick up this year and come with lots of coronal holes. Storms will keep on increasing until 2028.

Then they’ll fall off sharply to usher in the solar minimum. Meanwhile, at around 8pm on January 16 a plasma ejection reached us after being sent out by the sun on January 13.

Scientists predict it could trigger weak magnetic storms and auroras at latitudes above 60 degrees. When directed toward Earth, a solar storm can create a major disturbance in our magnetic field, called a geomagnetic storm.

Sunspots cause dramatic phenomena

The effects can include radio blackouts, power outages, and beautiful aurora in the sky. Individual sunspots and groups of them can last anywhere from a few days to a few months but they eventually decay.

They grow and shrink as they move across the surface of the sun, with diameters ranging from 16 km to 160,000 km. Larger sunspots can be seen from Earth without a telescope.

Sunspots travel at a few hundred meters per second when they first emerge. They indicate intense magnetic activity and come with phenomena such as coronal loops, prominences, and reconnection events.

Most solar flares and coronal mass ejections start near visible sunspot groupings.

Similar phenomena can be seen in other stars, where they are known as starspots.

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