the dark spots on the sun are called sunspots.
the dark spots on the sun are called sunspots.
what are the dark spots on the sun called?
sunspots
when jesuit christoph scheiner first observed sunspots in march 1611, he ignored them until he saw them again in october. when he saw them again, he attributed the sightings to either a defect in the eye, problems with the lens of the telescope, or a possible disturbance in the atmosphere, but he rejected all three hypotheses. he rejected the hypothesis that he had a defect in his eye because others also observed the spots. he used eight other telescopes and all of them had visible spots on the sun. he also rejected that there was a disturbance in the atmosphere for four reasons.the first was that no cloud could follow the sun's diurnal motion throughout the day, especially given the sun's diameter. the spots also showed no parallel motion, but the spot's movement across the sun was constant. his final reason was that the spots could be seen through small clouds. scheiner believed that these dark spots were visible because there were small orbiting bodies around the sun, which would block the sun's light. this explanation would allow him to avoid aristotle's belief that the sun was a perfect celestial being.
letters on sunspots
neptune's dark spots are thought to occur in the troposphere at lower altitudes than the brighter cloud features, so they appear as holes in the upper cloud decks. as they are stable features that can persist for several months, they are thought to be vortex structures. often associated with dark spots are brighter, persistent methane clouds that form around the tropopause layer. the persistence of companion clouds shows that some former dark spots may continue to exist as cyclones even though they are no longer visible as a dark feature. dark spots may dissipate when they migrate too close to the equator or possibly through some other unknown mechanism.
neptune