Naked sunspots

Abstract

Naked sunspots are spots seen in H-alpha to be devoid of associated plage. In magnetograms and K-line little if any opposite polarity field is found, and in soft X ray images a blank appears in the region of the spot. In almost all cases studied in which naked spots resulted the spot groups had emerged in unipolar regions of the same polarity as the naked spot. At least half of the naked spots are associated with coronal holes. The naked spots are long-lived and show rotation rates close to the Newton-Nunn curve. Most of the naked spots had bright rims in H-alpha, and the one spot observed to disappear left no trace in the background magnetic field. These spots may be a means by which separation of p from f magnetic polarity occurs.