Sunspots are dark patches which appear on the sun from time to time. They are areas where the magnetic field inside of the sun breaks through onto the surface, disrupting the movements which produce light. They are correlated with the gravitational or tidal shadows which the planets cast upon the sun as they travel around it.
The increase and decrease of the number of sunspots which occurs over the course of ~11 years is driven by the ~11 year orbital periods of Jupiter and Saturn. The polarity of the sun also flips around every ~11 years, as the Solar cycle.
There is some controversy about the appropriate way to ascribe causality to sunspots. Some insist that the empirical evidence for the dependence of sunspots on the difference between the position of the center of the sun and the position of the center of mass of the solar system tells a straightforward story about how the pull of the planets influences sunspot formation. Others insist on a more complicated story in terms of magnetohydrodynamics within the sun.
If you surround a sun with lasers which uniformly coat it in light, it would cause the sun to cool because the heat from the lasers would cause the sun to expand, reducing the pressure in the core of the sun where fusion occurs.
Now, imagine a laser shining on a single spot on the sun, and picture it cooling and relieving the pressure in that spot so that the electromagnetic field of the sun bulges out in order to cancel out an electromagnetic field which is impinging upon it. It would be due to Lenz’s law: nature hates a change in flux.
If a sun’s or a planet’s gravity is produced by a breathing oscillation of a sphere of particles which collectively radiate electromagnetic waves which add up to form a gravitational potential energy well, then these waves will propagate outwards to interact with the waves emitted by neighboring planets or suns. I think that these gravitational waves’ intensity upon the surface of the sun could very well influence the formation of sunspots. I picture the gravitational waves from all of the planets adding up and casting an uneven gravitational shadow on the surface of the sun. In response, the sun burps up an electromagnetic field to cancel it out.
In terms of accelerator physics, a sunspot contains a beam of charged particles which shoots out of the sun like a spark and is bent back towards the sun by the sun’s magnetic field. The bent particle beam radiates light tangential to its bend. This is the light that we worry about when we talk about solar flares occurring in sunspots, blasting our planet’s magnetosphere and frying our electrical grids.
Here is the data about where sunspots form and migrate:
The migration pattern is due to the fact that the center of the sun takes 35 days to rotate around the axis and the region near the poles takes 25 days. The axis of rotation is also not lined up with the ecliptic (the plane on which most of the planets orbit).
Here is the theory about the solar center and the solar system center of mass:
It is helpful to think about sunspots in terms of orbital harmonics and simple relationships between the fundamental forces, however, you would find people who insist that this way of thinking is controversial.
One can find lots of speculations on the internet about correlations between sunspots and various geophysical effects -like volcanoes, but it may not be that sunspots directly cause such things - rather both sunspots and geophysical changes are caused by the same tidal forces from nearby planets and, since it is much closer and is strongly influenced by the surrounding planets, the lunar cycle. Of course, depending on how the iron core of the earth and the solar wind interact, this fact could be very wrong about this.
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