Motions in the sun reveal inner workings of sunspot cycle
The sun’s magnetic activity follows an 11-year cycle. Over the course of a solar cycle, the sun’s magnetic activity comes and goes. During solar maximum, large sunspots and active regions appear on the sun’s surface. Spectacular loops of hot plasma stretch throughout the sun’s atmosphere and eruptions of particles and radiation shoot into interplanetary space. During solar minimum, the sun calms down considerably. A striking regularity appears in the so-called butterfly diagram, which describes the position of sunspots in a time-latitude plot. At the beginning of a solar cycle, sunspots emerge at mid-latitudes. As the cycle progresses, they emerge closer and closer to the equator. To explain this “butterfly diagram,” solar physicists suspect that the deep magnetic field is carried toward the equator by a large-scale flow.
phys.org
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2020-06-25
