Seminar: Solar-like Stellar Activity Cycles and the Mystery of the Maunder Minimum

The Sun's 11-years activity cycle is an important driver of space weather, with consequences for satellite health, global communications, and even the integrity of city power grids, but it remains poorly understood. One of its most intriguing features is its apparent cessation for 70 years shortly after the discovery of sunspots by Galileo, during which sunspots were extremely rare.

It is natural to look to other, Sun-like stars to get an understanding of stellar dynamos generally, and to see how frequent such "Grand Magnetic Minima" might be. I will describe work by my group to stitch together starspot records across more than 50 years of data for dozens of nearby stars, including many solar analogs, and our eventual prize: the first unambiguous record of a star entering a Grand Magnetic Minimum.

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We shall leave for lunch at around 12:15. There will be fika after the seminar.