Secrets of sunspots and solar magnetic fields investigated in NASA supercomputing simulations

The Sun is much more than just a source of light for Earth--it's a dynamic and complex star, with storms, flares, and movement causing it to change constantly. Magnetic fields govern most of the solar activity we can observe but how they do this is still poorly understood. New results based on simulations out of NASA's Advanced Supercomputing facility at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley are painting a more complete picture of one of the most prominent magnetically-driven solar features--a cycle of sunspot formation known as a "torsional oscillation."