Maunder minimum

“I am more convinced this is a Maunder Minimum star than anything else I’ve seen,” says Jennifer van Saders, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, who was not involved in the discovery.

Gathering sunspot counts and other historical observations, astronomer John Eddy concluded nearly 50 years ago that the Sun had essentially taken a 70-year nap, which he called the Maunder Minimum after an astronomer couple who had previously studied it.

During this transition, as the star heads toward a “lazy” state in which its activity is flat rather than cycling, random perturbations in its magnetic field can result in temporary cycle shutoffs like the Maunder Minimum, Nandi says.

By building a decades-long record of observations of a few dozen stars at specific wavelengths that trace stellar activity, a team of astronomers has identified another star going through its own Maunder Minimum period.

The sun may be about to set records for sunspot numbers and violent storms, or it may be sliding into a decline like the Maunder Minimum, from 1645 to 1715, when hardly any sunspots appeared — a period that became known in Europe as the Little Ice Age.