A Power-law Distribution of Solar Magnetic Fields Over More Than Five Decades in Flux

Details A Power-law Distribution of Solar Magnetic Fields Over More Than Five Decades in Flux A Power-law Distribution of Solar Magnetic Fields Over More Than Five Decades in Flux

May 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009spd....40.0603p&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, SPD meeting #40, #6.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.811

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The surface of the Sun is covered with magnetic features observed on many spatial scales, which evolve on differing time scales: the largest features, sunspots, follow an 11 year cycle; the smallest apparently follow no cycle. Magnetograms from SoHO/MDI (full disk and high-resolution) and Hinode/SOT are analysed to determine the fluxes of all currently observable surface magnetic features. To identify features we use a 'clumping' algorithm, which defines a single feature as a group of contiguous, same-sign pixels, each of which exceeds an absolute flux cutoff. We show that, using this feature identification method, all feature fluxes, regardless of flux strength, follow the same distribution - a power-law with slope -1.85±0.14 - between 2x 1017 and 1023 Mx. This result implies that the processes that determine the spatial structure of surface magnetic features are scale-free. Hence, suggesting that either all surface magnetic features are generated by the same mechanism, or that their spatial structure is dominated by processes in the interior or at the surface (e.g., fragmentation, coalescence and cancellation) that produce a scale-free distribution. We will discuss the likelihood of these two mechanisms for generating the powerlaw distribution of feature fluxes.

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