Multimedia Gallery - Visualization

Sunspot Origins

Sunspots can have major impacts on communications and weather on Earth, and researchers are trying to understand their behavior by simulating how sunspots form, beginning deep within the Sun as "magnetic tubes" and floating upward to appear on the Sun's surface. The simulation by researchers in Juri Toomre's group at the University of Colorado required some 15,000 processor hours on a computing system at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego. Shown are a time sequence of slices of the full 3-D magnetic field from the initial magnetic buoyancy instability (top) and a snapshot related to flow rotation generated by the magnetically-induced motions (bottom right).
Image courtesy of G. Vasil and N. Brummell, U. of Colorado.
Source: San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC San Diego

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Additional info:More information: SOHO website http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/

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