THE SUN LOOKS LIKE A BILLIARD BALL: The sun has now been without spots for 7 consecutive days. Our star looks like an enormous yellow billiard ball:

The last time sunspots vanished for a whole week was in Dec. 2010--a time when the sun was bouncing back from a long Solar Minimum. In this case, the 7 week interregnum is a sign that a new Solar Minimum is coming.  

The sunspot cycle is like a pendulum, swinging back and forth every 11-years or so between times of high and low sunspot number.  The next low is expected in 2019-2020. Between now and then sunspots will become increasingly rare with stretches of days, then weeks, then months of "billiard-ball suns."
Without sunspots, there will be fewer solar flares and CMEs. However, that doesn't mean space weather will stop.  On the contrary, new forms of space weather will rise to the fore, including high doses of cosmic rays, more "space lightning" (sprites), altered states of ham radio propagation, and geomagnetic storms triggered by solar wind streams and co-rotating interaction regions instead of CMEs. Stay tuned for the next phase of the solar cycle

http://spaceweather.com/