Scientific American:  Sunspots have long been known to appear and disappear from the sun's surface. The powerful magnetic fields that block light from escaping the sun's interior burst into being on the surface and slowly fade as they migrate toward the poles. A new model may help predict the intensity and timing of such solar outbursts as well as reveal the underlying mechanism of the sunspot cycle.

Mausumi Dikpati and her colleagues at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder used new observations of the sun's interior and new computer simulations to model the flow of plasma, or electrically charged gas, that carry the sunspots like a conveyor belt until they become powerful enough to burst free of the belt and erupt on the sun's surface. As the spots weaken, the conveyor belt then slowly carries them toward the poles and, ultimately, back into the sun's core where they become the foundation of the next sunspot cycle. "The remnants from the past three cycles combine to produce a certain seed for the present cycle," Dikpati explains. "We now know that it takes two cycles to fill half the belt with magnetic field and another two cycles to fill the other half. Because of this, the next solar cycle depends on characteristics from as far back as 40 years previously--the sun has a magnetic memory."

Sources:   
New Model Predicts Timing and Intensity of Solar Storms 
CHANNELS: ASTRONOMY
March 07, 2006   
http://tinyurl.com/qflwa

Posted at 08:11 AM in Science | Permalink

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/763/4403918

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference New Model Predicts Timing and Intensity of Solar Storms :