"We can now expect to see an increasing number of sunspots from [this new] cycle," said Douglas Biesecker, a solar physicist with the U.S. government's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado.
Sunspots mark where a region of intense magnetic field from deep inside the sun emerges on its surface. The spots alone do not cause so-called space weather, but they are related to solar storms. More sunspots mean more stormy space weather.
The spots occur in cycles of increasing and decreasing activity that last approximately 11 years.
"Seeing the first sunspot of the next solar cycle is important because it does mean that finally we're seeing what will be the eventual end of Cycle 23," he said.
For accounting purposes, Cycle 24 officially begins when the number of spots associated with it outnumbers the sunspots associated with Cycle 23, he added. That should occur within months.David Hathaway is a solar physicist with the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. He equated last week's sunspot to the first kernel in a batch of popcorn going off."It takes them going off repeatedly before the new cycle takes over," he said.
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