Images of the sun over 10 years reveal how the star’s activity spikes and dips over time. Credit: The Yohkoh mission of ISAS, Japan, and NASA, United States
A team of solar scientists has uncovered the possible originals of the engine that drives much of the sun’s volatile nature—generating the sunspots that move like storm clouds over the surface and causing the sun’s activity levels to rise and fall over 11-year cycles. “Galileo first observed the sunspots 400 years ago, and he learned quite a bit about them, including how they move over the sun’s surface,” said Brown, a co-author of the research and associate professor in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences. “But he couldn’t figure out where they came from. We’ve struggled with the question ever since.
That notion, however, struggles to explain the order that emerges from the sun’s chaos. Instead, Vasil, Brown and their colleagues turned to a phenomenon in physics called a “magnetorotational instability.” It’s a sort of imbalance that forms whenever magnetic fields interact with rotating plasmas where those flows move faster as you go deeper.
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