The Babcock Model describes a mechanism which can explain magnetic and sunspot patterns observed on the Sun. A modern understanding of sunspots starts with George Ellery Hale, in which magnetic fields and sunspots are linked. Hale suggested that the sunspot cycle period is 22 years, covering two polar reversals of the solar magnetic dipole field.
Butterfly diagram showing paired sunspot pattern. Graph is sunspot Wolf number.
Horace W. Babcock proposed in 1961 a qualitative model for the dynamics of the solar outer layers:
- The start of the 22-year cycle begins with a well-established dipole field component aligned along the solar rotational axis. The field lines tend to be held by the highly conductive solar plasma of the solar surface.
- The solar surface plasma rotation rate is different at different latitudes, and the rotation rate is 20 percent faster at the equator than at the poles (one rotation every 27 days). Consequently, the magnetic field lines are wrapped by 20 percent every 27 days.
- After many rotations, the field lines become highly twisted and bundled, increasing their intensity, and the resulting buoyancy lifts the bundle to the solar surface, forming a bipolar field that appears as two spots, being kinks in the field lines.
- The sunspots result from the strong local magnetic fields in the solar surface that exclude the light-emitting solar plasma and appear as darkened spots on the solar surface.
- The leading spot of the bipolar field has the same polarity as the solar hemisphere, and the trailing spot is of opposite polarity. The leading spot of the bipolar field tends to migrate towards the equator, while the trailing spot of opposite polarity migrates towards the solar pole of the respective hemisphere with a resultant reduction of the solar dipole moment. This process of sunspot formation and migration continues until the solar dipole field reverses (after about 11 years).
- The solar dipole field, through similar processes, reverses again at the end of the 22-year cycle.
- The magnetic field of the spot at the equator sometimes weakens, allowing an influx of coronal plasma that increases the internal pressure and forms a magnetic bubble which may burst and produce an ejection of coronal mass, leaving a coronal hole with open field lines. Such a coronal mass ejections are a source of the high-speed solar wind.
- The fluctuations in the bundled fields convert magnetic field energy into plasma heating, producing emission of electromagnetic radiation as intense ultraviolet (UV) and X-rays.
References
- Babcock, H. W. (1961). "The Topology of the Sun's Magnetic Field and the 22-Year Cycle". Astrophys. J. 133 (2): 572-587.
