Abstract
The solar cycle represents the Sun’s periodically changing magnetic state, which is potentially subject to global magnetic anomalies emerging on it. What the characteristics are of the Sun’s large-scale magnetic field playing roles in these anomalies is a key to clarifying how the Sun deviates from its normal magnetic state. This article reports aggregation characteristics of the large-scale magnetic field associated with a global magnetic anomaly that emerged when the Sun went through one of the longest solar cycles in two hundred years. The characteristics were identified by extracting cluster feature values of solar surface magnetic fields via a population ecological method from synoptic maps, obtained by the longest homogeneous series of magnetic field observations for the past several decades. We found that the anomaly was due to the uneven clustering of positive and negative surface magnetic fields that occurred during the solar minimum leading to the last extended solar cycle. Our findings may provide new insight into magnetic field characteristics peculiar to a solar minimum with an extended cycle length.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge detailed comments and suggestions by G. Choe and S. Solanki which were very helpful for improving the manuscript. We also appreciate the reviewer’s useful comments. We used the synoptic charts of the Sun’s large-scale magnetic field provided by Wilcox Solar Observatory, Stanford University (http://wso.stanford.edu). The EUV and MDI data used here are produced by the SOHO/EIT and SOHO/MDI Consortiums; SOHO is a joint ESA-NASA program. Figure 4a was made using VAPOR (Clyne et al., 2007). This work was financially supported by the Core Research Program (NRF-2017R1A2B4002383) through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Korean government (MIST), as well as by the BK21 plus program through the NRF.
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Magara, T., An, J., Lee, H. et al. Aggregation Characteristics of the Sun’s Large-Scale Magnetic Field Associated with a Global Magnetic Anomaly in the Last Extended Solar Cycle. Sol Phys 296, 41 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-021-01782-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-021-01782-9