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Last Post 3/18/2013 10:20 AM by Dawn Myers

sunspots

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3/18/2013 7:11 AM
Virginia (NC) How come we see a steady stream of sunspots near the equator, north or south of, but never none near the Sun's poles?

Dawn Myers

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3/18/2013 10:20 AM
Terry wrote a great answer to this for a previous Solar Week. http://www.solarweek.org/CS/t/45.aspx The short answer is we don't know. We know that sunspots go through an 11 year cycle, they fist start appearing at about 30 degrees latitude and as the cycle near completion they end up all falling along the equator. This forms what we call a butterfly diagram, but why they don't appear at the poles is not fully understood, but one of the questions we are trying to answer. More about the butterfly diagram can be found here http://earthobservatory.n...arMax/solarmax_3.php