The sun has grown increasingly active over the past 17 years, bucking a downward trend that had solar physicists wondering whether our star was heading towards a new "grand minimum" of the kind last seen in 1830.
Beginning in the 1980s, solar activity started decreasing overall, with each subsequent 11-year sunspot cycle seeing fewer sunspots, fewer flares and fewer coronal mass ejections. Solar activity reached a nadir in 2008, which was the lull at the beginning of solar cycle 24. That year had the weakest solar activity on record.
