This time-lapse movie shows in five seconds what happens in 20 minutes on the Sun's surface near a sunspot . Visible is boiling granulation outside the sunspot, inward motion of bright grains in the outer penumbral region toward the sunspot , and the churning of small magnetic elements between solar granules . Sunspots themselves are relatively cool regions of the solar surface depressed by magnetic fields . The dark lanes surrounding the sunspot are called penumbral filaments, and recent computer simulations have shown that their behavior is also dominated by magnetic fields . The above sequence was taken with the new Dutch Open Telescope last September and focused on a sunspot that measured about 25,000 kilometers across.
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