Silent Sun upsets scientist's calculations

The Sun is having an unusually quiet time at the moment. Behaving almost like stock market, just when scientists thought it had hit the bottom, the sun spot cycle has gone a step further by going even lower than expected by the solar astronomers.

Scientists had reported last year that they observed no sunspots on 266 days (73%) of 366 saying that the solar cycle had hit the bottom in 2008.

But this is not the case as the same scientists have observed an unusually quiet time for the Sun with the sunspot counts for 2009 having dropped even lower. As on March 31, there were no sunspots on 78 of the year's 90 days (87%), NASA said.

'We are experiencing a very deep solar minimum,' said solar physicist Dean Pensell of the Goddard space Flight Centre of NASA.

Every 11 years or so, the sunspots (a region on the Sun's surface marked by intense magnetic activity) on the surface of the Sun die out during solar cycle minimum."