The Sun Does a Flip! Our Star's Magnetic Field Has Flipped!

NASA Science

The Sun Does a Flip

written by Staff

February 15, 2011

You can't tell by looking, but scientists say the Sun has just undergone an important change. Our star's magnetic field has flipped.

The Sun's magnetic north pole, which was in the northern hemisphere just a few months ago, now points south. It's a topsy-turvy situation, but not an unexpected one.

"This always happens around the time of solar maximum," says David Hathaway, a solar physicist at the Marshall Space Flight Center. "The magnetic poles exchange places at the peak of the sunspot cycle. In fact, it's a good indication that Solar Max is really here."

Above: Sunspot counts, plotted here against an x-ray image of the Sun, are nearing their maximum for the current solar cycle. [more information]

The Sun's magnetic poles will remain as they are now, with the north magnetic pole pointing through the Sun's southern hemisphere, until the year 2012 when they will reverse again. This transition happens, as far as we know, at the peak of every 11-year sunspot cycle -- like clockwork.

EarthÂ’s magnetic field also flips, but with less regularity. Consecutive reversals are spaced 5 thousand years to 50 million years apart. The last reversal happened 740,000 years ago. Some researchers think our planet is overdue for another one, but nobody knows exactly when the next reversal might occur.

Although solar and terrestrial magnetic fields behave differently, they do have something in common: their shape. During solar minimum the Sun's field, like Earth's, resembles that of an iron bar magnet, with great closed loops near the equator and open field lines near the poles. Scientists call such a field a "dipole." The Sun's dipolar field is about as strong as a refrigerator magnet, or 50 gauss (a unit of magnetic intensity). Earth's magnetic field is 100 times weaker.

Below: The Sun's basic magnetic field, like Earth's, resembles that of a bar magnet.

When solar maximum arrives and sunspots pepper the face of the Sun, our star's magnetic field begins to change. Sunspots are places where intense magnetic loops -- hundreds of times stronger than the ambient dipole field -- poke through the photosphere.

"Meridional flows on the Sun's surface carry magnetic fields from mid-latitude sunspots to the Sun's poles," explains Hathaway. "The poles end up flipping because these flows transport south-pointing magnetic flux to the north magnetic pole, and north-pointing flux to the south magnetic pole." The dipole field steadily weakens as oppositely-directed flux accumulates at the Sun's poles until, at the height of solar maximum, the magnetic poles change polarity and begin to grow in a new direction.

Hathaway noticed the latest polar reversal in a "magnetic butterfly diagram." Using data collected by astronomers at the U.S. National Solar Observatory on Kitt Peak, he plotted the Sun's average magnetic field, day by day, as a function of solar latitude and time from 1975 through the present. The result is a sort of strip chart recording that reveals evolving magnetic patterns on the Sun's surface. "We call it a butterfly diagram," he says, "because sunspots make a pattern in this plot that looks like the wings of a butterfly."

In the butterfly diagram, pictured below, the Sun's polar fields appear as strips of uniform color near 90 degrees latitude. When the colors change (in this case from blue to yellow or vice versa) it means the polar fields have switched signs.

Please click HERE to read the entire article and to look at the pictures...