New Solar Telescope Unveils the Complex Dynamics of Sunspots' Dark Cores

An anonymous reader writes: The high-resolution images, taken by the New Solar Telescope (NST), show the atmosphere above the umbrae (the dark patches in the center of sunspots) to be finely structured, consisting of hot plasma intermixed with cool plasma jets as wide as 100 kilometers. These ground breaking images are being captured by scientists at NJIT's Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO). Sunspots are formed when strong magnetic fields rise up from the convection zone, a region beneath the photosphere that transfers energy from the interior of the Sun to its surface. At the surface, the magnetic fields concentrate into bundles, which prevent the hot rising plasma from reaching the surface. This energy deficit causes the magnetic bundles to cool down to temperatures about 1,000 degrees lower than their surroundings. The NST takes snapshots of the Sun every 10 seconds, which are then strung together as a video to reveal fast-evolving small explosions, plasma flows and the movement of magnetic fields.

Comments

Re:Solar model of sun spots stinks!

[Nutria]

But the impossible mission of how the heat comes from the centre, and skips the relatively cool surface, to somehow end up as millions of degrees above, just makes no sense at all

It doesn't make sense to *us*, the popular science reading public. But does it make sense to the actual scientists?

And even if it doesn't make sense to them, so what? That's why they built the New Solar Telescope!! To, you know, learn new things and make better hypotheses.

I know the Electric Universe offers a very plausible explanation

Now we know you're either (1) a crank, or (2) terribly young and naive.

I was wondering if other people had their own views, or theories they'd like to share.

Anyone who "shares" (such a *compassionate* word :eyeroll:) their expertise in the subject and is not an actual solar scientist is either a blowhard, a crank, or both.