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What the Sudden Death of Solar Cycles Can Tell Us About the Nature of the Solar Interior

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Abstract

We observe the abrupt end of solar-activity cycles at the Sun’s Equator by combining almost 140 years of observations from ground and space. These “terminator” events appear to be very closely related to the onset of magnetic activity belonging to the next solar cycle at mid-latitudes and the polar-reversal process at high latitudes. Using multi-scale tracers of solar activity we examine the timing of these events in relation to the excitation of new activity and find that the time taken for the solar plasma to communicate this transition is of the order of one solar rotation – but it could be shorter. Utilizing uniquely comprehensive solar observations from the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) and Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) we see that this transitional event is strongly longitudinal in nature. Combined, these characteristics suggest that information is communicated through the solar interior rapidly. A range of possibilities exist to explain such behavior: for example gravity waves on the solar tachocline, or that the magnetic fields present in the Sun’s convection zone could be very large, with a poloidal field strengths reaching 50 kG – considerably larger than conventional explorations of solar and stellar dynamos estimate. Regardless of the mechanism responsible, the rapid timescales demonstrated by the Sun’s global magnetic-field reconfiguration present strong constraints on first-principles numerical simulations of the solar interior and, by extension, other stars.

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Acknowledgments

This work is dedicated to the memory of Michael J. Thompson – scientist, leader, mentor, colleague and friend. Special thanks to Dipankar Bannerjee, Ed Cliver, Subhamoy Chatterjee, Abhishek Srivastava, Ian Hewins, and many others for providing feedback on the material presented. This material is based upon work supported by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which is a major facility sponsored by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. 1852977. The compilation of feature databases used was supported by NASA grant NNX08AU30G. We acknowledge support from Indo-US (IUSSTF) Joint Networked R&D Center IUSSTF-JC-011-2016.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Center for Atmospheric Research, High Altitude Observatory, P.O. Box 3000, Boulder, CO, 80307, USA

    Scott W. McIntosh, Ricky Egeland, Mausumi Dikpati, Yuhong Fan & Matthias Rempel

  2. Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Robert J. Leamon

  3. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Code 672, Greenbelt, MD, 20771, USA

    Robert J. Leamon

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  1. Scott W. McIntosh
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Correspondence to Scott W. McIntosh.

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McIntosh, S.W., Leamon, R.J., Egeland, R. et al. What the Sudden Death of Solar Cycles Can Tell Us About the Nature of the Solar Interior. Sol Phys 294, 88 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-019-1474-y

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