Welcome to You Ask Andy

Sandra Forbes, age 9, of Brockville, onto, for her question:

Are there really spots on the sun?

Maybe you thought that our radiant sun had a perfect complexion. But this is not so at all. The face of Old Sol tends to erupt in spots and rashes. And a spot on the face of the sun may be 50 times larger than our whole world.

Like the little spots that mar our complexions the whopping sunspots tend to come and go. They may last a week or several months. There may be only one or a whole rash of them.

Sunspots, we are told, are really storms on the face of the sun. The sun is made of burning gases and its surface is never smooth. In telescope pictures the surface looks like the waves of the ocean. Here and there huge blazing streamers fly up and swoop over it. These are solar prominences,, always spouting up from the blazing sun.

The sunspots take place on the sun's heaving surface. We do not know what causes them. Ian average spot begins as a dark blot on the glowing face. It grows bigger by the minute. Gases blow out from the center at about a mile a second. Another and another spot may occur nearby and a whole rash of sunspots develops. Small spots may be only a few hundred miles wide. A large sunspot may be 50,000 miles wide.

Telescope pictures show those solar blemishes as dark spots. This is because the storm areas are cooler than the normal surface of the sun ‑3,000 Fahrenheit degrees cooler. The normal temperature of the sun's face is 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the heart of a sunspot may be only 8,000 degrees. This big drop in temperature causes a sunspot to look dark by comparison with the rust of the sun's face.

Sunspots do not occur near the north and. south pales of the sun end rarely on its equator. They occur in belts north and south of its equator.

Through yours of observation we know that sunspots occur in cycles. cycle lasts about 11 years. In a peak year poor old Sol may suffer 400 rashes  on his  face. The number drops year by year until only about 50 rashes occur.  Then they increase until 11 years after the last peak when they reach  is a new peak.

A bad sunspot period is felt 93 million miles away on our little earth. Those solar storms have powerful magnetic fields. Streams of electrons pour forth from them in all directions. They strike the earth, especially near the magnetic poles, 'they cause the beautiful northern lights and they often interfere with radio, telephone and telegraph signals.

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