Magneto-optical effect and structure of sunspot magnetic field

Abstract

On the basis of a numerical soluton of the equations of transfer of Stokes parameters including the magneto-optical effect, we calculated monochromatic images of unipolar sunspots in the linear polarization signal and compared them with the observed data obtained at Marshall Space Flight Center, U.S.A. The results show that our radial fan-shaped model of sunspot magnetic field give images that are similar to the observed ones while a spiral model gives rather different pictures. We can therefore regard the former model as being the more realistic.