What is Up With The Sun?

Have you noticed the Sun has been in the news a lot lately? The reason is the current cycle is finally starting to wake up and send out more flares and solar storms. I am happy about it and my solar filter is happy as well. It finally gets to come out of the box and play! Its recent turmoil is particularly newsworthy because the Sun was very quiet for a super long time. Astronomers had a tough time explaining the extended solar minimum. New computer simulations imply that the Sun's long quiet spell resulted from changing flows of hot plasma within it.
The Sun is made of plasma, not liquid solid or gas. Plasma contains negative electrons and positive ions which flow freely. Flowing plasma creates magnetic fields, which lie at the core of solar activity like flares, eruptions, and sunspots. The Sun contains huge streams of plasma kind of like our Earth's ocean currents. Those plasma currents affect solar activity.
The Sun also operates in cycles... many cycles. In one of the cycles the Sun's activity rises and falls on 11 year increments. At its most active, called solar maximum, dark sunspots are scattered on the Sun's ...