Active Longitudes Revealed by Large-scale and Long-lived Coronal Streamers

Abstract

We use time-series ultraviolet full sun images to construct limb-synoptic maps of the Sun. On these maps, large-scale, long-lived coronal streamers appear as repetitive sinusoid-like arcs projected over the polar regions. They are caused by high altitude plasma produced from sunspot-rich regions at latitudes generally far from the poles. The non-uniform longitudinal distribution of these reveals four longitudinal zones at the surface of the sun from which sunspots erupt preferentially over the 5-year observing interval (2006 January to 2011 April). Spots in these zones (or "clusters") have individual lifetimes short compared to the lifetimes of the coronal features which they sustain, and erupt at different times. The four sunspot clusters contain >75% of all numbered sunspots in this period. They occupy two distinct longitudinal zones separated by ~180 degree and each spanning ~100 degree in longitude. The rotation rates of the spot clusters are ~5% faster than the rates at both the surface and the bottom of the convection zone. While no convincing theoretical framework exists to interpret the sunspot clusters in the longitude-time space, their persistent and nonuniform distribution indicates long-lived, azimuthal structures beneath the surface, and are compatible with the existence of previously-reported active longitudes on the sun.Comment: 26 pages, 8 figures, Accepted by ApJ 2011 April 28, http://www2.ess.ucla.edu/~jingli/ApJ201104