The sun might be experiencing midlife crisis, say scientists.

Like a middle-aged dad looking back on his youth, the sun might be experiencing its own midlife crisis.
That’s the upshot of an intriguing new study published in the journal Science.
The blazing ball of fire that Earthlings depend on for survival is now 4.5 billion years old — nearing the halfway point of its life expectancy.
Activity from the sun can be measured by the amount of sunspots and solar flares that appear in an 11-year cycle.
“We think that the sun is around the age where its magnetic field is undergoing a transition and so possibly we’re seeing evidence of that transition,” remarked Australian astronomer and study co-author Benjamin Montet.
During its peak, hundreds of sunspots and eruptions shooting radiation streams into space are the norm.
A sunspot cycle is an effect of the twisting of magnetic fields as the star rotates. As a star gets on in years, it begins to slow down.

Although Earth appears to be a perfect circle, it's not. It mostly resembles an ellipsoid. But even that doesn't accurately describe its evolving shape.
As the planet rotates on its axis, it flattens at its poles and bulges at the equator. The imbalance forces the poles to bulge by about 70,000 feet. This anomaly makes the distance from Earth's center to sea level about 13 miles (20.9 km) more at the equator than at the poles.
Additionally, the shape of the Earth is always changing.
It periodically changes with the daily tides, which affects both the ocean and the Earth's crust. Sometimes the changes are slow and steady, due to shifting tectonic plates or massive sheets of melting ice, and sometimes they’re jarring due to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or meteor strikes.
Astronomers from the Max Planck Institute contrasted the sun’s exertion level with that of faraway stars.
Calculating shifts in our sun’s brightness and variability with that of 369 stars roughly the same age, composition and temperature, researchers noted some surprising differences.
“The typical sunlike star observed by (the Kepler Telescope) is actually quite a bit noisier than the sun,” said Montet.
After four years of observation, the other stars had sunspot activity five times greater than our sun at its peak.
“It’s not uncommon to see such large variability, but we were surprised to see it in stars . . . similar to the sun,” explained Montet, adding that more kinetic sunspot activity indicates stars with stronger flares, which could affect the habitability of nearby planets.