NASA says solar activity is increasing after decades-long lull: "The sun is slowly waking up"

The sun has become more and more active over the last 16 years, in a turn that surprised scientists and could affect space weather and technology on Earth, NASA announced this week.

A new research, conducted by two NASA scientists and published earlier in September in a the peer-reviewed Astrophysical Journal Letters , shows that solar activity has ramped up after 2008 — an unexpected reversal following a decades-long decline that was initially thought to foreshadow a period of historic inaction on the surface of the sun.

"All signs were pointing to the Sun going into a prolonged phase of low activity," Jamie Jasinski, a space plasma physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the study's lead author, said in a statement. "So it was a surprise to see that trend reversed. The