Sometime in the next two or three months, something special will happen: the magnetic field that emanates from the Sun and extends throughout the entire solar system will reverse in polarity.
“It’s really hard to say exactly when it’s going to happen, but we know it’ll be in the next few months, for sure,” says Andrés Muñoz-Jaramillo, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who studies the Sun’s magnetic cycle. “This happens every solar cycle, and it’s a very special day when it does.”First, the basics: the Sun, like Earth, naturally generates a magnetic field. The massive solar magnetic field is a result of the flow of plasma currents within the Sun, which drive charged particles to move from one of the Sun’s poles to another.
Every 11 years, the strength of this magnetic field gradually decreases to zero, then emerges in the opposite direction, as part of the solar cycle. It’s as if, here on Earth, compasses pointed towards the Arctic as “North” for 11 years, then briefly wavered, then pointed towards Antarctica as “North” for the next 11 years (in fact, the Earth’s magnetic field does reverse as well, but it occurs with much less regularity, and takes a few hundred thousand years to do so).
Recent observations indicate that the next solar magnetic reversal is imminent—in August, NASA announced that it was three or four months away. The reversal, explains Muñoz-Jaramillo, won’t be a sudden, jarring event but a gradual, incremental one. “The strength of the polar field gradually gets very close to zero,” he says. “Some days, it’s slightly positive, and other days, it’s slightly negative. Then, eventually, you see that it’s consistently in one direction day after day, and you know the reversal has occurred.” His research group’s measurements of the magnetic field suggest this reversal is a few months away, but it’s impossible to say for sure which day it’ll occur.
Because the region that the solar magnetic field influences includes the entire solar system, the effects of the reversal will be felt widely.
