The sun is “slowly waking up”, according to scientists at NASA, and they’re not entirely sure why. But what does this actually mean? Is our home star about to come to life and swallow us whole, like some kind of eldritch horror? Not exactly. But it could mean that some chaotic space weather is coming our way.

The first thing you need to know is that solar activity – meaning the frequency and intensity of events like solar flares – typically goes in cycles. Every 11 years or so, this cycle moves from a ‘quiet’ period called the solar minimum, to the solar maximum, during which we’re more likely to see auroras in the night sky, caused by geomagnetic storms. During the solar maximum, observers also see more ‘sunspots’ caused by intense activity on the sun’s surface.

However, there are some longer-term fluctuations in the sun’s activity, as well. Throughout history – from 1645 to 1715, for example, or 1790 to 1830 – solar activity was unusually low across the whole cycle. In the early 2000s, scientists thought we were entering a similar period, which seemed to be confirmed at the time of the last solar maximum, around 2013 and 2014.

A new study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, however, seems to blow that theory out of the water... or the sea of super-hot plasma, I guess. Measuring multiple factors like solar wind, number of sunspots, and the strength of its magnetic field, the researchers came to the conclusion that the sun’s activity has actually been on the rise since around 2008, and could rise even further across subsequent cycles.

“All signs were pointing to the sun going into a prolonged phase of low activity,” says Jamie Jasinski, lead author of the study and plasma physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, in a statement. “It was a surprise to see that trend reversed. The sun is slowly waking up.”

What does this mean for us, you might ask? Well, astrologers will tell you that the sun’s energy can affect the very core of your being and alter your consciousness, so that could be worth keeping in mind. On the other hand, a single solar storm caused as much as $500 million in damages to farmers in 2024, by disrupting GPS satellites used for navigation. On the plus side, we got to see some really amazing auroras.

The data for the new study came from various NASA missions, which are constantly gathering information from our cosmic surroundings. Still, there remains a lot of work to be done if we want to predict these events reliably, and actually do something about them. “We don’t really know why the sun went through a 40-year minimum starting in 1790,” as Jasinski says. “The longer-term trends are a lot less predictable and are something we don’t completely understand yet.”