Related papers: Solar active regions: a nonparametric statistical …
Aims. The Sun shows strong variability in its magnetic activity, from Grand minima to Grand maxima, but the nature of the variability is not fully understood, mostly because of the insufficient length of the directly observed solar activity…
The Maunder minimum (MM) of greatly reduced solar activity took place in 1645-1715, but the exact level of sunspot activity is uncertain as based, to a large extent, on historical generic statements of the absence of spots on the Sun. Here…
Using a reconstruction of sunspot numbers stretching over multiple millennia, we analyze the statistics of the occurrence of grand minima and maxima and set new observational constraints on long-term solar and stellar dynamo models. We…
In this paper, we investigate the inhomogeneous spatial distribution of solar faculae. The focus is on the latitudinal and longitudinal distributions of these highly localised features covering ubiquitously the solar surface. The…
Previous helioseismology of sunspots has been sensitive to both the structural and magnetic aspects of sunspot structure. We aim to develop a technique that is insensitive to the magnetic component so the two aspects can be more readily…
The diagram of indices of coronal and chromospheric activity allowed us to reveal stars where solar-type activity appears and regular cycles are forming. Using new consideration of a relation between coronal activity and the rotation rate,…
Sunspots are areas of strong magnetic fields driven by a convective dynamo. Rudolf Wolf devised his Sunspot Number (SN) series to describe its variation with time. Most other solar phenomena vary in concert with SN, in particular the…
Context. Local helioseismology has detected spatially extended converging surface flows into solar active regions. These play an important role in flux-transport models of the solar dynamo. Aims. We aim to validate the existence of the…
The mainstream dynamo models predict that the sunspot cycle is non-stationary and stochastic. The official Solar Cycle Prediction Panel forecasts only the ongoing sunspot cycle because any forecast beyond one cycle is considered impossible.…
Context. Solar activity, dominated by the 11-year cyclic evolution, has been observed directly since 1610. Before that, indirect cosmogenic proxy data are used to reconstruct it over millennia. Recently, the precision of radiocarbon…
Geomagnetic activity has two main peaks in the 11-year sunspot cycle caused by two types of solar agents: coronal mass ejections and high speed solar wind streams, whose variations in number and intensity are related to the variations in…
The ratio of penumbral to umbral area of sunspots is an important topic for solar and geophysical studies. Hathaway (Solar Physics, 286, 347, 2013) found a curious behaviour in this parameter for small sunspot groups (areas smaller than 100…
On a centennial timescale, solar activity was quantified based on records of instrumental sunspot observations. This article briefly discusses several aspects of the recent archival investigations of historical sunspot records in the 17th…
We analyzed the daily sunspot-group data reported by the Greenwich Photoheliographic Results (GPR) during the period 1874-1976 and Debrecen Photoheliographic Data (DPD) during the period 1977-2017 and studied North-South asymmetry in the…
The Kodaikanal Observatory has made synoptic observations of the Sun in white light since 1904, and these images are sketched on the Stonyhurst grids called sun charts. These continuous hand-drawn data sets are used for long-term studies of…
We use archival daily spot coverage measurements from Howard et al. (1984) to study the rotational modulation of the Sun as though it were a distant star. A quasi-periodic Gaussian process measures the solar rotation period $P_\mathrm{rot}…
The latitudinal location of the sunspot zones in each hemisphere is determined by calculating the centroid position of sunspot areas for each solar rotation from May 1874 to June 2011. When these centroid positions are plotted and analyzed…
The emergence of the magnetic field through the photosphere has multiple manifestations and sunspots are the most prominent examples of this. One of the most relevant sunspot properties, to study both its structure and evolution, is the…
The Waldmeier Effect is the observation that the rise time of a sunspot cycle varies inversely with the cycle amplitude: strong cycles rise to their maximum faster than weak cycles. The shape of the cycle and thus the rise time does not…
The subsurface structure of a solar sunspot is important in the stability of the sunspots and the energy transport therein. Two subsurface structure models have been proposed, the monolithic and cluster models, but no clear observational…