The astronomers, Dr. David Hathaway, Robert Wilson and Ed Reichmann of
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and Dr.
Dibyendu Nandy of Montana State University in Bozeman, reported their
findings the week of June 16 at the annual meeting of the Solar Physics
Division of the American Astronomical Society in Laurel, Md. The results
were also published in the May 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

The astronomers made their discovery by reviewing the positions and
sizes of all sunspots seen on the Sun since 1874. "The sunspots appear
in two bands on either side of the Sun's equator," said Hathaway.
"Although the individual sunspots come and go from week-to-week, the
central positions of the bands in which they appear drift slowly toward
the solar equator over the course of each 11-year sunspot cycle."
Previously, scientists believed this equator-ward drift was a wave-like
process involving magnetic forces. However, this new evidence suggests
this drift is produced by a giant circulation system in which the
compressed gases, 125,000 miles below the Sun's surface, move from the
Sun's poles to its equator at about three mph -- a leisurely walking
pace. The gases then rise near the equator and turn back toward the
poles, traveling in the surface layers where the gas is less compressed
-- moving at a faster rate of approximately 20 to 40 mph. Recent
progress in theoretical modeling of the sunspot cycle has emphasized the
important role of this circulation.

The speed of this circulation system, called a meridional circulation,
changes slightly from one sunspot cycle to the next. The circulation is
faster in cycles shorter than the average 11-year period and slower in
cycles longer than the average period. This is a strong indication that
this circulation acts like an internal clock that sets the period of the
sunspot cycle.
The circulation also appears to influence the strength of future cycles,
as seen in the number and sizes of the sunspots produced, not in the
cycle immediately following, but rather in a two-cycle or 22-year time
lag. When the flow is fast, it concentrates the magnetic field at the
Sun's poles. These stronger fields are then transported downward into
the solar interior where they are further compressed and amplified to
become the intense magnetic fields that form sunspots years later.

The Sun is now in the declining phase of the current sunspot cycle that
peaked in 2000 and 2001. Because the circulation flow was fast during
the previous cycle, the astronomers believe the next cycle will be a
strong one, peaking in the years 2010 and 2011.

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