MOSCOW, Jan. 20 (Xinhua) -- Solar activity is currently at its peak and is expected to remain at a high level for the next two to three years, a Russian expert said on Tuesday.
"The Sun is now at the peak of its maximum activity. This means that the number of flares will likely remain at roughly the same level for another two to three years," said Anton Reva, a senior research fellow at the Laboratory of Solar Astronomy of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Solar activity is expected to bring more auroras but also potential risks to satellites and power grids.
Periods characterized by higher or lower numbers of solar flares are known as the solar maximum and solar minimum, respectively, said Reva, noting that it remains difficult to predict precisely when the current solar maximum will begin to decline.
"At present, all models that attempt to forecast the solar cycle in detail perform poorly," he said. "We can confidently say that there is a certain periodicity, but physics cannot yet determine exactly when, down to the month, or what precise form the flare activity frequency will take."
Earlier, Russia's Institute of Applied Geophysics reported that the first highest-class solar flare of 2026 was recorded on Sunday evening, leading to a 200-fold increase in radiation exposure for spacecraft due to a massive influx of accelerated protons from the Sun reaching Earth's orbit.
Solar flares are classified into five categories, A, B, C, M and X, based on the intensity of their X-ray radiation. The weakest class, A0.0, corresponds to a radiation power of 10 nanowatts per square meter at Earth's orbit, with each subsequent class representing a tenfold increase in intensity. Solar flares are often accompanied by coronal mass ejections, whose plasma clouds can trigger geomagnetic storms upon reaching Earth. ■
