What is a butterfly diagram?

A butterfly diagram (appropriately named because of its appearance) highlighting the positions of the spots for each rotation of the sun since May 1874 shows that these bands first form at the sun's mid-latitudes, widen, and then move toward the equator as each cycle progresses.

What is the Maunder butterfly diagram?

1. Introduction The time-latitude evolution of sunspot occurrence, known as the Maunder butterfly diagram, is one of the most spectacular manifestations of the cyclic variability of solar activity, resulting from the action of the solar dynamo in the Sun’s convection zone ( Charbonneau 2010; Hathaway 2015 ).

How are sunspot groups ascribed to a butterfly wing?

Only the first appearance of each sunspot group was considered. We performed a full separation of the butterfly wings, using the method developed by Leussu et al. (2016), so that each sunspot group was uniquely ascribed to a wing (solar cycle and hemisphere) of the butterfly diagram. A digital database is available at the CDS.

What makes the solar system unique?

The solar system is unique in the cosmos due to a number of distinctive features that differentiate it from other star systems and celestial objects in the universe. These features include: The central star of the solar system, the Sun, is a yellow dwarf star of spectral type G2V.

What are the features of the Sun?

These features include: The central star of the solar system, the Sun, is a yellow dwarf star of spectral type G2V. Size of the Sun (average diameter): Approximately 1.4 million kilometers (109 times the diameter of the Earth).

What is a small body in the Solar System?

Any natural solar system object other than the Sun, a planet, a dwarf planet, or a moon is called a small body; these include asteroids, meteoroids, and comets. Most of the more than one million asteroids, or minor planets, orbit between Mars and Jupiter in a nearly flat ring called the asteroid belt.