QUIET SUN: How quiet can a star with eight sunspot groups be? Pretty quiet, it turns out. The sun has that many sunspots and more facing Earth, yet none of them is producing flares. Regard this plot of the sun’s X-ray output for the past two days; it has almost flat-lined:

Perhaps this is the calm before the storm. Sunspot AR1319 has a ‘beta-gamma’ magnetic field that harbors energy for strong M-class flares. NOAA forecasters estimate a 30% chance of such an eruption in the next 24 hours

fr/spaceweather.com