Magnetic fields realign, giving birth to sunspots, solar flares
On February 19 and 20, magnetic fields on the sun rearranged and realigned, and the two dark sunspots on the bottom, which are gigantic -- more than six Earth diameters across -- appeared suddenly, in less than 48 hours.
The sunspots evolved into what's called a delta region, in which the lighter penumbra region surrounding the sunspot exhibit magnetic fields that point in the opposite direction of those fields in the center dark area. It's an unstable configuration which we know can lead to solar flare radiation eruptions.
This image combines images from two instruments on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory: the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager, which takes pictures in visible light that show sunspots, and the Advanced Imaging Assembly, which took an image in the 304 Angstrom wavelength showing the lower atmosphere of the sun, which is colorized in red.
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