Sunspot Seething
Our Sun's surface is continually changing.
This time-lapse movie shows in five seconds
what happens in 20 minutes on the
Sun's surface near a
sunspot.
Visible is boiling
granulation outside the sunspot,
inward motion of bright grains in the
outer penumbral region toward the
sunspot,
and the churning of small magnetic elements between
solar granules.
Sunspots themselves are relatively cool
regions of the solar surface depressed by
magnetic fields.
The dark lanes surrounding the sunspot are called
penumbral filaments, and
recent computer simulations have shown that
their behavior is also dominated by
magnetic fields.
The above sequence was taken with the new
Dutch Open Telescope last September and focused on a
sunspot that
measured about 25,000 kilometers across.