Over the course of two decades until 2008, the solar wind became significantly weaker with a constant declining trend in many important solar wind parameters, and solar cycle 24 being the weakest on record since the start of the space age. Here we show that since 2008, the Sun has reversed this long-term weakening trend with a steady increase in various solar wind proton parameters observed at 1au. Furthermore, comparison of values from a fitted trend to data between 2008 and 2025 show the following increases in solar wind proton parameters: speed (~6%), density (~26%), temperature (~29%), thermal pressure (~45%), mass flux (~27%), momentum flux or dynamic pressure (~34%), energy flux (~40%), interplanetary magnetic field magnitude (~31%) and the radial component of the magnetic field (~33%). This has important implications on long-term solar trends, implying that the exceptional weakness of solar cycle 24 was most likely a recent outlier and that the Sun is not entering a modern era Maunder/Dalton-like minimum phase in its solar variation, but is instead recovering from a ~20-year decline. Presently, the trending average solar wind dynamic pressure of ~1.9 nPa in the current solar cycle, however, is still lower than the recorded ~2.4 nPa at the end of the 20th century. Continuous future measurements will reveal whether this increase will continue in upcoming solar cycles or whether these parameters will remain stable.

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Voyager 2 revealed that Uranus hosts an unusual magnetosphere with a highly oblique and off-centered magnetic field. The properties of this complex magnetosphere, however, cannot be understood without carefully considering the role of external forcing by the solar wind. Here we show that Voyager 2 observed Uranus’ magnetosphere in a highly atypical, compressed state that we predict to be present <5% of the time. However, the prevailing understanding of the Uranian magnetosphere is based on this single observation, leading to a description of the system as a canonical extreme case, with inexplicably intense electron radiation belts and a magnetosphere that is seemingly largely void of plasma. Contrastingly, we show that had Voyager 2 arrived at Uranus just a few days earlier, the upstream solar wind dynamic pressure would have been ~20 times lower, resulting in Voyager 2 observing a dramatically different magnetospheric configuration.

M-type stars are the most common stars in the universe. They are ideal hosts for the search of exoplanets in the habitable zone (HZ), as their small size and low temperature make the HZ much closer in than their solar twins. Harboring very deep convective layers, they also usually exhibit very intense magnetic fields. Understanding their environment, in particular their coronal and wind properties, is thus very important, as they might be very different from what is observed in the solar system. The mass loss rate of M-type stars is poorly known observationally, and recent attempts to estimate it for some of them (TRAPPIST-1, Proxima Cen) can vary by an order of magnitude. In this work, we revisit the stellar wind properties of M-dwarfs in the light of the latest estimates of M through Lyman-α absorption at the astropause and slingshot prominences. We outline a modeling strategy to estimate the mass loss, radiative loss and wind speed, with uncertainties, based on an Alfven wave driven stellar wind model. We find that it is very likely that most TRAPPIST-1 planets lie within the Alfven surface, which imply that these planets experience star-planet magnetic interactions (SPMI). We also find that SPMI between Proxima Cen b and its host star could be the reason of recently observed radio emission.

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No abstract available.