Small-scale magnetic elements in Solar Cycle 23

TL;DR

This study analyzes over 13 million small-scale solar magnetic elements during Solar Cycle 23, revealing their cyclic behavior, flux contributions, and relationships with sunspots, providing insights into solar magnetic activity variations.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive analysis of small-scale magnetic elements over a solar cycle, highlighting their flux contributions and correlation patterns with sunspots, which was previously less understood.

Findings

Quiet regions dominated the Sun's magnetic flux for about 8 years.

The flux ratio of quiet regions characterizes the solar cycle and minima.

Most small-scale magnetic elements show anti-correlation with sunspots.

Abstract

With the unique database from Michelson Doppler Imager aboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory in an interval embodying solar cycle 23, the cyclic behavior of solar small-scale magnetic elements is studied. More than 13 million small-scale magnetic elements are selected, and the following results are unclosed. (1) The quiet regions dominated the Sun\textsf{'}s magnetic flux for about 8 years in the 12.25 year duration of Cycle 23. They contributed (0.94 -- 1.44) $\times 10^{23}$ Mx flux to the Sun from the solar minimum to maximum. The monthly average magnetic flux of the quiet regions is 1.12 times that of active regions in the cycle. (2) The ratio of quiet region flux to that of the total Sun equally characterizes the course of a solar cycle. The 6-month running-average flux ratio of quiet region had been larger than 90.0% for 28 continuous months from July 2007 to October 2009, which characterizes very well the grand solar minima of Cycles 23-24. (3) From the small to large end of the flux spectrum, the variations of numbers and total flux of the network elements show no-correlation, anti-correlation, and correlation with sunspots, respectively. The anti-correlated elements, covering the flux of (2.9 - 32.0)$\times 10^{18}$ Mx, occupies 77.2% of total element number and 37.4% of quiet Sun flux. These results provide insight into reason for anti-correlated variations of small-scale magnetic activity during the solar cycle.