Wade Miller Jr., age 15, of Dillon, S.C., for his question:
DO SUNSPOTS HAVE ANY EFFECT ON EARTH?
A typical sunspot may have a diameter of about 20,000 miles. Most have two parts: an inner part called the umbra, which may have a diameter of about 8,000 miles, and an outer part called the penumbra, which may have a diameter of about 12,000 miles. These spots are large. To give you a size comparison, the earth's diameter is about 8,000 miles.
Sunspots are dark areas in the photosphere of the sun. The photosphere is the bright, visible art of the sun. Sunspots have been called storms on the sun, but this is a questionable description. Terrestrial storms move through the earth's atmosphere. Sunspots do not travel across the face of the sun but are carried around it by the sun's rotation.
Sunspots are centers of great turbulence with very strong magnetic fields. They are dark because they are cooler than the general bright surface of the sun. They appear to penetrate the photosphere to some depth and to provide a vent for some of the forces created in the tremendous pressures and high temperatures that exist there.
Phenomena connected with sunspots have a very definite effect upon the earth. The tremendous bursts of energy which produce flares and prominences and which are associated more often than not with sunspots expel particles of matter of subatomic size for millions of miles into space and often strike the atmosphere of the earth. When such energy bursts reach the earth, they upset the structure of the atmosphere by causing magnetic storms.
The delicate electronic instruments of mankind which depend upon the integrity of the atmospheric structure are often adversely affected by sunspots: radio telephone service is interrupted, teletype machines will transmit garbled messages and television and radio equipment doesn't work properly.
Scientists also say there is also a possibility of a connection between sunspot cycles and the weather on earth.
Sunspots are generally confined to a region between the sun's equator and the poles of the axis of the sun's rotation. They are rarely seen directly on the equator and never at the poles.
Astronomers do not know exactly how or why sunspots form or how they are related to other events on the sun. Sunspots can be considered to be tremendous electromagnets.
The magnetic fields of sunspots sometimes amount to 2,500 to 3,000 gauss over vast areas. A gauss is a measure of the strength of a magnetic field. A single loop of wire with a radius of 0.628 cm., through which flows a current of one ampere, possesses a field of one gauss at its center.