English

Does the butterfly diagram indicate asolar flux-transport dynamo?

Astrophysics 2009-11-10 v1

Abstract

We address the question whether the properties of the observed latitude-time diagram of sunspot occurence (the butterfly diagram) provide evidence for the operation of a flux-transport dynamo, which explains the migration of the sunspot zones and the period of the solar cycle in terms of a deep equatorward meridional flow. We show that the properties of the butterfly diagram are equally well reproduced by a conventional dynamo model with migrating dynamo waves, but without transport of magnetic flux by a flow. These properties seem to be generic for an oscillatory and migratory field of dipole parity and thus do not permit an observational distinction between different dynamo approaches.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0403570,
  title  = {Does the butterfly diagram indicate asolar flux-transport dynamo?},
  author = {M. Schuessler and D. Schmitt},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0403570},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

4 pages, 1 figure