![]() ![]() ![]() The more sunspots, the higher the activity is on the Sun. This contrast makes sunspots stand out even more. On the photosphere, we can sometimes see dark spots, known as sunspots. Sunspots are cooler portions on the surface of the photosphere and are typically 1500K cooler than the surrounding area. At the same time, the hot gases blocked by these sunspots flow into the areas around them, making those areas even hotter and brighter than normal. Because sunspots are cooler than the rest of the sun's surface, they look darker. The bunched up spots - actually twists in the magnetic field lines - have so much magnetic power that they push back the hot gases beneath them and prevent the heat from rising directly to the surface. (Specifically, a point on the equator takes 25 Earth days to go around, while a point near one of the poles takes 36 days to complete its rotation.) Over time, all that messy and uneven movement twists and distorts the sun's main magnetic field in the same way that your bed sheets get wrinkled and bunched up when you toss and turn in your sleep. The interior and the exterior of the sun rotate separately the outside rotates more quickly at the equator than at the solar north and south poles. Sunspots occur because the sun isn't a hunk of rock like the Earth and the inner planets, but a ball of continually circulating hot gases that doesn't move in one piece. Sunspots are cooler because they're areas of intense magnetism - so intense that it inhibits the flow of hot gases from the sun's interior to its surface. That interior is surrounded by a larger, lighter area called the penumbra, which is about 500 degrees cooler than the rest of the sun. The dark interior of a sunspot, called the umbra, is about 1,600 degrees cooler than the rest of the sun's surface. Surprisingly, the photosphere is also much cooler than the atmosphere above it, which has regions with temperatures as hot as 2 million C (3.5 million F). Sunspots appear dark to us because they're cooler than the surrounding areas on the sun's visible surface, or photosphere, which has a temperature of about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,537.8 degrees Celsius). ![]()
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