Sunspots Under the Spotlight

摘要

Sunspots are dark because their strong magnetic fields suppress the convective heat flux from the interior of the Sun. However, convection cannot be fully suppressed; otherwise, sunspots would be a lot darker. The penumbra (the filamentary region that surrounds the sunspot's central dark patch), in particular, has been explained in terms of overturning convection by recent numerical models. Based on observations with the Swedish 1-meter Solar Telescope, Scharmer et al.