Bipolar Magnetic Regions on the Sun: Global Analysis of the SOHO/MDI Data Set

TL;DR

This study analyzes over 160,000 bipolar magnetic regions on the Sun from SOHO/MDI data, revealing their properties, tilt angles, and implications for solar dynamo theories, challenging the traditional flux rope paradigm.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive statistical analysis of bipolar magnetic regions over 16 years, questioning existing models of flux emergence and the scale separation in solar dynamo processes.

Findings

Tilt angles follow Joy's law closely.

Some regions violate Hale's polarity law.

Evidence of multiple flux systems coexisting at the same latitude.

Abstract

The magnetic flux that is generated by dynamo inside the Sun emerges in the form of bipolar magnetic regions. We have analyzed the whole set of solar magnetograms obtained with the SOHO/MDI instrument in 1995-2011, and automatically identified 160,079 bipolar magnetic regions that span a range of scale sizes across nearly four orders of magnitude. Their properties have been statistically analyzed, in particular with respect to the polarity orientations of the bipolar regions, including their tilt angle distributions. The latitude variation of the average tilt angles (with respect to the E-W direction), known as Joy's law, is found to closely follow the relation 32.1*sin(latitude)[deg]. There is no indication of a dependence on region size that one may expect if the tilts were produced by the Coriolis force during the buoyant rise of flux loops from the tachocline region. A few percent of all regions have orientations that violate Hale's polarity law. We show examples, from different phases of the solar cycle, where well defined medium-size bipolar regions with opposite polarity orientations occur side by side in the same latitude zone. Such oppositely oriented large bipolar regions cannot be part of the same toroidal flux system, but different flux systems must coexist in the same latitude zones. These examples are incompatible with the paradigm of coherent, subsurface toroidal flux ropes as the source of sunspots, and instead show that fluctuations must play a major role at all scales for the turbulent dynamo. We see no observational support for a separation of scales or a division between a global and a local dynamo, since also the smallest scales in the data set retain a non-random component that significantly contributes to the accumulated emergence of a N-S dipole moment that leads to the replacement of the old global poloidal field with a new one that has the opposite orientation.