On the sunspot structure

Abstract

The fine structure of a sunspot is studied on a series of photographs obtained during the third flight of the Soviet Stratospheric Solar Station. The main results are as follows: (1) The micro-photometer tracings on the frames show extremely high Rayleigh resolution of small elements, the smallest distances being near to the theoretical limit. The half-widths of the brighter elements are given in Tables III and VI. The corrected brightness of umbral dots has large dispersion. (2) The dimensions of the smallest dots are equal to the diffraction image of bright points. So the real radii of these objects are smaller than 150km, which is consistent with opaque models of sunspot umbra. (3) The penumbra and umbra structure (dark and bright objects) is in good agreement with the picture of magnetic field splitting in a system of magnetic ropes giving rise to the magnetic arcs in the chromosphere and corona. Only in the umbra do we meet the large scale continuities.