There are no spots on the side of the Sun facing the Earth — the star is a perfect disk without any features. This was reported by the Solar Astronomy Laboratory of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The last time the Sun could be observed without a single spot was December 11, 2021 — more than four years ago. At the same time, the flare activity index reached zero — for the first time since 2024.
Sunspots — dark areas of the surface in zones of the highest concentration of magnetic flux — are considered an almost integral feature of an active star. Since the energy of flares is drawn from magnetic fields, the number and area of spots directly correlate with the level of activity. Their complete disappearance is characteristic only of a state of extremely low activity — as a rule, during the years of the solar minimum.
The sharpness of the fall is all the more unexpected, since the maximum of the current cycle was passed only a year and a half ago, and January and early February 2026 turned out to be exceptionally turbulent: the Sun broke two records of the century at once — in terms of the power of the radiation storm and the number of strong flares in one active region.
The Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences emphasizes that at the current stage of the cycle, the depression cannot be long and must end. Nevertheless, history knows many decades-long periods of a sharp decrease in the number of spots — the most famous of them, the Maunder Minimum (1645–1715), coincided with the coldest phase of the Little Ice Age in Europe and North America.