Sunspot Seething
Explanation: Our Sun's
surface is continually changing. This time-lapse
movie shows in five seconds what happens in 20 minutes on the Sun's
surface near a sunspot. Visible is boiling granulation
outside the sunspot, inward motion of bright grains in the outer penumbral
region toward the sunspot,
and the churning of small magnetic elements between solar
granules. Sunspots themselves are relatively cool regions of the solar
surface depressed by magnetic
fields. The dark lanes surrounding the sunspot are called penumbral
filaments, and recent
computer simulations have shown that their behavior is also dominated by magnetic
fields. The above sequence was taken with the new Dutch Open Telescope last
September and focused on a sunspot that measured about 25,000 kilometers across.
