Anatomy of Sunspots

Debi Prasad Choudhary Department of Physics and Astronomy California State University Northridge

Galileo discovered the sunspots with his telescope around 400 years ago. George Hale discovered extra-terrestrial magnetism at these locations in Los Angeles about 100 years ago. Yet, we do not have a clear understanding of the structure of these objects even today! It is important to know the physical mechanisms that govern the formation, stability and decay of these objects since they effect near earth space weather and solar irradiance that influence the climate. The availability of high spatial resolution observations for a long period of time using space based telescopes enabled us to study the properties of sunspots that are useful to understand the structure of sunspots. I this lecture, I shall describe the anatomy of sunspots derived used the recent high resolutions images obtained with Hinode Solar Optical Telescope, which is a 50 cm optical telescope in space platform for solar observations.