It was announced in August, that it had been more than 100 years since the sun did not manifest sunspots for an entire month. Now we’re almost into two months…until now. What’s quite amazing about this sunspot (which no one is talking about,) is that this sunspot appears to have a square geometry as shown in the enlargement to the left.
In the upper left corner a dark feature is visible. Only a few of these objects were visible across the entire surface when this image was taken. Superheated plasma dancing randomly can be seen everywhere in this image. Each of these tiny peaks are actually hundreds to thousands of miles high.Yet this lone, square sunspot appears out of nowhere.
On 9/23/2008, NASA held a press conference about the current state of our sun:
"This new spot has both the magnetic orientation and the high-latitude position of a sunspot belonging to the new solar cycle, Cycle 24. Will this be the harbinger of more solar changes to come and mark the beginnings of a rise in solar activity in the near future? Only time will tell. If the pattern from the record of the past 400 years holds, we can expect that solar activity will begin to show an increase in the next few months."