Sunspots occur because the sun isn’t a hunk of rock like the Earth and the inner planets, but a ball of continually circulating hot gases that doesn’t move in one piece. The interior and the exterior of the sun rotate separately; the outside rotates more quickly at the equator than at the solar north and south poles. Over time, all that messy and uneven movement twists and distorts the sun’s main magnetic field in the same way that your bed sheets get wrinkled and bunched up when you toss and turn in your sleep. The bunched up spots—actually twists in the magnetic field lines—have so much magnetic power that they push back the hot gases beneath them and prevent the heat from rising directly to the surface. In other words, they become sunspots.
Because sunspots are cooler than the rest of the sun’s surface, they look darker. At the same time, the hot gases blocked by these sunspots flow into the areas around them, making those areas even hotter and brighter than normal. This contrast makes sunspots stand out even more.
Sunspots’ Effect on Earth
Sunspots are connected with other solar events like flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). A solar flare is a sudden release of energy from the sun, while a CME actually shoots hot plasma from the sun into space. The precise mechanisms that trigger flares and CMEs are not yet known, but the bigger the group of sunspots, the more intense such solar weather tends to be.
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