Solar variation - Solar Storm - A threat to mankind?

Under the solar activity is defined as a characteristic cyclic changes in the sun, which is most noticeable in the frequency of sunspots. Although sunspots are at a lower temperature than the rest of the solar surface, have the sun shines during the activity maximum at a slightly higher power than in the sunspot minimum. The solar activity is responsible for space weather events and impacts directly on satellite, but also on technicalequipment on the ground. You beeiflußt beyond the aurora, the ionosphere and thus the propagation ofradio waves on Earth.

Since the mid-20th Century, the Sun is in an unusually active phase, as researchers believe the Max Planck Society. The solar activity is thus about twice as high as the long-term average, and higher than ever in the past 1000 years. An international team of researchers has investigated the solar activity over the pastmillennia. Since the end of the last glacial, the sun was therefore rarely been as active as the 1940's untiltoday. As scientists from Germany, Finland and Switzerland in the journal Nature (October 28, 2004) report,one must go back over 8,000 years in the earth, until we find a period in which the sun was just as active in the middle as in the past 60 years. Researchers led by Sami Solanki from the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Solar System Research in Katlenburg-Lindau, have traced the solar activity by means of heavy carbonatoms (C14-particles). From the study of earlier periods of high solar activity, the researchers predict that the current high solar activity will probably continue only for a few decades.