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Individual sunspots or groups of sunspots may last anywhere from a few days to a few months, but eventually decay. Sunspots expand and contract as they move across the surface of the Sun, with diameters ranging from 16 km (10 mi) [3] to 160,000 km (100,000 mi). [4] Larger sunspots can be visible from Earth without the aid of a telescope. [5]
Solar cycles are nearly periodic 11-year changes in the Sun's activity that are based on the number of sunspots present on the Sun's surface. The first solar cycle conventionally is said to have started in 1755. The source data are the revised International Sunspot Numbers (ISN v2.0), as available at SILSO. [1]
Solar cycle 23 lasted 11.6 years, beginning in May 1996 and ending in January 2008. The maximum smoothed sunspot number (monthly number of sunspots averaged over a twelve-month period) observed during the solar cycle was 120.8 (March 2000), and the minimum was 1.7. [29] A total of 805 days had no sunspots during this cycle. [30] [31] [32]
Beneath the layer, the hot, dense plasma moved in ways not unlike magma in Earth's mantle, which gives the sun its grainy appearance. In this image, the sunspots look more like dark spots, or ...
The current solar maximum likely began in early 2023, as the sun began to display more and more sunspots, which are low-temperature regions on the sun's surface created by concentrated magnetic ...
Not all sunspots will produce an eruption and, when they do, not all eruptions pose a threat because they might miss Earth, Alex James, a solar physicist at the University of College London, told ...
For a sunspot to be visible to the human eye it must be about 50,000 km in diameter, covering 2,000,000,000 square kilometres (770,000,000 sq mi) or 700 millionths of the visible area. Over recent cycles, approximately 100 sunspots or compact sunspot groups are visible from Earth. [c] [32]
The Solar Orbiter mission has captured the highest-resolution views of the sun’s surface to date, showcasing massive sunspots related to increasing solar activity.