Sunspots are the most prominent manifestations of magnetic fields on the visible surface of the Sun (photosphere). While historic records mention sunspot observations by eye more than two thousand years ago, the physical nature of sunspots has been unraveled only in the past century starting with the pioneering work of Hale and Evershed. Sunspots are compact magnetic-field concentrations with a field strength exceeding 3,000 G in their center, a horizontal extent of about 30 Mm and typical lifetimes on the order of weeks. Research during the past few decades has focused on characterizing their stunning fine structure that became evident in high-resolution observations. The central part of sunspots (umbra) appears, at visible wavelengths, dark due to strongly suppressed convection (about 20% of the brightness of unperturbed solar granulation); the surrounding penumbra with a brightness of more than 75% of solar granulation shows efficient convective energy transport, while at the same time the constraining effects of magnetic field are visible in the filamentary fine structure of this region. The developments of the past 100 years have led to a deep understanding of the physical structure of sunspots. Key developments were the parallel advance of instrumentation; the advance in the interpretation of polarized light, leading to reliable inversions of physical parameters in the solar atmosphere; and the advance of modeling capabilities enabling radiation magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations of the solar photosphere on the scale of entire sunspots. These developments turned sunspots into a unique plasma laboratory for studying the interaction of strong magnetic field with convection. The combination of refined observation and data analysis techniques provide detailed physical constraints, while numerical modeling has advanced to a level where a direct comparison with remote sensing observations through forward modeling of synthetic observations is now feasible. While substantial progress has been made in understanding the sunspot fine structure, fundamental questions regarding the formation of sunspots and sunspot penumbrae are still not answered.
On the scales of formations in the fine structure of the brightness field in the solar photosphere
