Astronomers in ancient China noticed sunspots several thousand years ago. The I-Ching or "Book of Changes," which dates back to the 12th century B.C., mentions a "Ri Zhong Jian Mei," which means "a star was seen within the sun" in English. The first written record of a sunspot sighting dates to 28 B.C., when it was noted that "the sun was yellow at its rising and a black vapor as large as a coin was observed at its center." On the other side of the world, the Aztecs, who ruled Mexico before the Spanish arrived in the 1500s, also paid a lot of attention to the sun. As we discussed, their creation myth featured a sun god with a pockmarked face.

In Europe, people had a harder time accepting the existence of sunspots. That was because everyone -- including the Catholic Church -- accepted Greek philosopher Aristotle's idea that the heavens were perfect and unchanging. Instead, when a large sunspot appeared for eight days in A.D. 807, they dismissed the phenomenon as the passage of the planet Mercury across the sun.



However, after the telescope was developed in the early 1600s, the Italian astronomer Galileo and others clearly saw that the sun had dark spots. Astronomer and Catholic priest Christoph Scheiner tried to come up with an explanation that didn't contradict Church teachings; he argued that the spots actually were undiscovered planets that orbited very close to the sun and were visible only when the planets were in front of the sun. Despite Scheiner's attempts, Galileo correctly figured out that sunspots were part of the sun itself by closely studying the movement of sunspots over time. By the mid-1700s, European astronomers were recording and compiling their observations of sunspots on a daily basis.

As scientists accumulated more and more data, they began to notice that sunspot activity developed a pattern. In 1843, astronomer S.H. Schwabe was the first to describe the 11-year sunspot cycle.

Since then, scientists used have used an array of tools -- including giant solar telescopes that were specially cooled to observe the sun's light without being distorted by its heat -- to learn more about the physics of sunspots. Astronomer George Ellery Hale discovered sunspots' magnetic nature and used that discovery to prove the existence of a large magnetic field in the sun's interior. More recently, astronomers have discovered starspots -- sunspots on other stars. One giant star, HD 12545, bears a spot 10,000 times larger than the biggest spots observed on the sun.

Related HowStuffWorks Articles

More Great Links

Sources