As sunspots emerge on the sun's surface close to its equator, their orientations will match the old magnetic field, while sunspots forming closer to the poles will have a magnetic field matching the ...

Scientists have estimated that this polar flip, which can take thousands of years to complete, happens about once every million years, though the time between flips has varied greatly — from ...

But the exact reason why this causes a flip in polarity remains unknown. "That gets into the whole [solar] cycle, and wondering what that is," Stanford University solar physicist Phil Scherrer ...