|While it's easy to understand gas pressure (as gas is heated it
expands, increasing pressure, and as it cools, it contracts,
decreasing pressure), magnetic pressure may be a tougher concept
to grasp. David Dearborn explains, "If you take those places
where there are concentrations of magnetic field and put them
together, they have pressure of their own. You can feel magnetic
pressure when you take two magnets and take the ends of the same
polarity and try to put them together. The just don't quite want
to go together. That's magnetic pressure."| |George Fisher and
David Dearborn answer the question, "What is a sunspot?"||Think
of a sunspot as a bubble of magnetic pressure, surrounded, by
the gas pressure of the photosphere. For the sunspot to exist,
the total pressure must be in balance between the region inside
and the region outside of the sunspot. David Dearborn elaborates
on how magnetic fields keep sunspots cooler: " Outside a
sunspot, you have only gas pressure, which depends on the
temperature. In the