Now these emissions seem to follow the sunspot peaks - their peak was in 2002, two years after the sunspots
A large flame emerges from the rim of the sun (bottom right) and a cloud begins its journey (bottom left).
Astronomers recently discovered key facts needed to understand the sun's 11-year cycle. The sunspots and flares on the surface of the Sun complete a cycle, but the gas clouds do not follow this cycle.
Now these emissions seem to follow the sunspot peaks - their peak was in 2002, two years after the sunspots.
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turnover and transportation
The sun's 11-year activity cycle - known for the development and disappearance of sunspots - has been known since 1843 when Heinrich Schwab, a German astronomer, identified the pattern. Years later it was identified that the origin of this cycle is magnetic by George Ellery Hale, an American astronomer who saw in 1908 that sunspots are intense magnets. Since then, many theories have come and gone that tried to describe the solar cycle. The currently accepted theory is that the sunspot cycle is the result of circulation and convection of heat within the sun. The fact is that the outer layers of the sun are bubbling, and that the sun rotates faster at the equator than at the poles, and faster inside the sun than on the surface, and the result is a solar dynamo that completes a course in 11 years.
Thus, at several stages during the magnetic cycle, the sun somehow sheds the old, distorted magnetic skin, allowing a new, less problematic layer to appear.
The Soho spacecraft recently discovered solid evidence of how the Sun does this. Eight years of observations of gas eruptions known as Coronal Mass Ejections (CME's) show that they remove the Sun's old magnetic field piece by piece first from one pole to the equator and then from the other pole. "The sun is like a snake shedding its skin," said Nath Gopalswamy of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and author of the report in the Astrophysical Journal.
"In this case it is a magnetic skin. The process is long. The shedding is a violent process. Over a thousand coronal emissions, each carrying with it billions of tons of gas from the polar regions, are needed to clean the old magnetism. However, when it is all over, the bands of the Sun's magnetic field change You are their direction.
The analysis of almost eight years of data about CMEs is a big step towards finding the logic in predicting the 'weather' in space," said Joseph Gorman, NASA's Soho Project Scientist.
By identifying the solar origin of the CME events with different speeds and appearances, and coming from different latitudes, this proves our ability to predict the space climate and how it could affect the Earth, in the different phases of the solar cycle.
