Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía | Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas | 2015 Feb 19
High resolution observations using the HINODE satellite reveal the existence of small magnetic elements inside solar supergranules
The magnetic field that covers the Sun and determines its behavior –the eleven year cycles no less than such conspicuous phenomena as solar spots and solar storms– also has another side to it: a magnetic web that covers the entire surface of the Sun at rest and whose net magnetic flow is greater than that of the active areas. A study led by the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC) has revealed where the flow that feeds this web comes from.Click to play embedded YouTube video.
The outline of the solar magnetic web coincides with the boundaries of the so-called supergranules, structures linked to the existence of hot gas rising to the surface (similar to the bubbles made by boiling water) some twenty thousand kilometers in diameter.
"We have discovered that inside these supergranules, in what is known as intranetwork, small magnetic elements appear which travel toward the outer boundaries and interact with the web”, says Milan Gosic, IAA researcher in charge of the study.
The monitoring of these heretofore little known elements was a considerable advance in and of itself, but the calculation of their contribution to the solar magnetic web has come as a major surprise: these small elements can generate and transfer, in the span of barely fourteen hours, the entire magnetic flow detected on the web. "Bearing in mind that only about 40% of this flow ends up on the web, we find that the intranetwork can replenish the flow of the web in twenty four hours”, says Luis Bellot (IAA-CSIC), a member of the research team. ...
The Solar Internetwork. I. Contribution to the Network Magnetic Flux - Milan Gošić et al
- Astrophysical Journal 797(1) 49 (2014 Dec 10) DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/797/1/49
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1408.2369 > 11 Aug 2014