Spot cycle reconstruction: an empirical tool - Application to the sunspot cycle

Abstract

The increasing interest in understanding stellar magnetic activity cycles is a strong motivation for the development of parameterized starspot models which can be constrained observationally. In this work we develop an empirical tool for the stochastic reconstruction of sunspot cycles, using the average solar properties as a reference. The synthetic sunspot cycle is compared with the sunspot data extracted from the National Geophysical Data Center, in particular using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. This tool yields synthetic spot group records, including date, area, latitude, longitude, rotation rate of the solar surface at the group's latitude, and an identification number. Comparison of the stochastic reconstructions with the daily sunspot records confirms that our empirical model is able to successfully reproduce the main properties of the solar sunspot cycle. As a by-product of this work, we show that the Gnevyshev-Waldmeier rule, which describes the spots' area-lifetime relation, is not adequate for small groups and we propose an effective correction to that relation which leads to a closer agreement between the synthetic sunspot cycle and the observations.

9 pages, 14 figures

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• The effects of granulation and supergranulation on Earth-mass planet detectability in the habitable zone around F6-K4 stars
• Automated approach to measure stellar inclinations: validation through large-scale measurements on the red giant branch
• On the relation between active-region lifetimes and the autocorrelation function of light curves
• On the contribution of sunspots to the observed frequency shifts of solar acoustic modes
• Comparison of the shape and temporal evolution of even and odd solar cycles
• A thorough analysis of the short- and mid-term activity-related variations in the solar acoustic frequencies