Babcock Redux: An Amendment of Babcock's Schematic of the Sun's Magnetic Cycle

Moore, Ronald L., Jonathan W. Cirtain, and Alphonse C. Sterling, Babcock Redux: An Amendment of Babcock's Schematic of the Sun's Magnetic Cycle, 48, 111.03 (2017) (ADS)

The cartoon

(click on the image for a larger version)

A revision of the celebrated Babcock model for the development of the solar cycle in the interior of the Sun. This cartoon represents the late onset phase of the sunspot-cycle development, and it attempts to capture the 3D nature of what must happen to the global field. One can see a 3-cell meridional flow in the convection zone, and below that the red toroidal fields that erupt as "omega loops" to produce sunspots and the flares/CMEs that this Archive documents as best it can. "Topological pumping" in the convection zone forces oppositely-directed horizontal fields to reconnect.

This "Babcock Redux" cartoon is a bit of an anomaly in the Archive, since it doesn't readily link to other cartoons. But the behavior of the global magnetic field of the Sun surely has a role to play.

Date: 2021 April 20