Related papers: Restoring process of sunspot penumbra
Discovered in 1909 the Evershed effect represents strong mass outflows in sunspot penumbra, where the magnetic field of sunspots is filamentary and almost horizontal. These flows play important role in sunspots and have been studied in…
Solar flares occur due to the sudden release of energy stored in active-region magnetic fields. To date, the pre-cursors to flaring are still not fully understood, although there is evidence that flaring is related to changes in the…
The conjecture that energy transport in sunspot penumbrae occurs through convection by an interchange of magnetic flux tubes is used in order to construct a magnetostatic model for a deep penumbra which is part of a global sunspot model.…
We present numerical 2D magnetostatic models for sunspot penumbrae consisting of radially aligned field-free gaps in a potential magnetic field, as proposed by Spruit and Scharmer (2006). The shape of the gaps and the field configurations…
We studied the formation of the first penumbral sector around a pore in the following polarity of the Active Region (AR) NOAA 11490. We used a high spatial, spectral, and temporal resolution data set acquired by the Interferometric…
After a dynamically active emergence phase, magnetic flux at the solar surface soon ceases to show strong signs of the subsurface dynamics of its parent magnetic structure. This indicates that some kind of disconnection of the emerged flux…
High resolution spectropolarimetric observations by Hinode reveal the existence of supersonic downflows at the umbra-penumbra boundary of 3 sunspots that was recently reported by Louis et al. (2010). These downflows are observed to be…
To investigate the penumbral plasma flow on a small scale, spectropolari- metric data of sunspots recorded by HINODE was used. Maps of Doppler velocities were created by evaluating the bisector in the line-wing, thereby visualizing the flow…
Daily records of sunspot group areas compiled by the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, from May of 1874 through 1976 indicate a curious history for the penumbral areas of the smaller sunspot groups. On average, the ratio of penumbral area to…
The penumbra is ideally suited to challenge our understanding of magnetohydrodynamics. The energy transport takes place as magnetoconvection in inclined magnetic fields under the effect of strong radiative cooling at the surface. The…
A precise knowledge of the surface structure of sunspots is essential to construct adequate input models for helioseismic inversion tools. We summarize our recent findings about the velocity and magnetic field in and around sunspots using…
We interpret penumbral filaments as due to convection in field-free, radially aligned gaps just below the visible surface of the penumbra, intruding into a nearly potential field above. This solves the classical discrepancy between the…
We recently presented evidence that stable umbra-penumbra boundaries are characterised by a distinct canonical value of the vertical component of the magnetic field, $B^{\rm stable}_{\rm ver}$. In order to trigger the formation of a…
We determined the direction and strength of the photospheric and lower chromospheric magnetic field in the umbra and penumbra of a sunspot from inversions of spectropolarimetric observations of photospheric lines at 617\,nm and 1565\,nm,…
The flare-prolific active region NOAA 10930 offered both a developing delta-spot and a decaying satellite sunspot of opposite polarity. The objective of this study is to characterize the photometric decay of the satellite sunspot and the…
The relationship between the decay of sunspots and moving magnetic features (MMFs) plays an important role in understanding the evolution of active regions. We present observations of two adjacent sunspots, the gap between them, and a lot…
We study the velocity structure of penumbral filaments in the deep photosphere to obtain direct evidence for the convective nature of sunspot penumbrae. A sunspot was observed at high spatial resolution with the 1-m Swedish Solar Telescope…
Aims: We search for penumbral magnetic fields of opposite polarity and for their correspondence with downflows. Methods: We used spectropolarimetric HINODE data of a spot very close to disk center to suppress the horizontal velocity…
Relying on the assumption that the interchange convection of magnetic flux tubes is the physical cause for the existence of sunspot penumbrae, we propose a model in which the dynamical evolution of a thin magnetic flux tube reproduces the…
We determine the entire electrical current density vector in a geometrical 3D volume of the inner penumbra of a sunspot from an inversion of spectropolarimetric data obtained with Hinode/SP. Significant currents are seen to wrap around the…