I read some news stories about the current Solar maximum and the flipping of the magnetic poles. They say that one of the magnetic poles has switched polarity and the other will switch in about a month. I don't really understand magnetism, but I had thought you had to have 2 opposite polarity magnetic poles. How can the Sun's magnetic poles not switch in sync with each other?
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The Sun is not a point object, in fact it occupies a huge swath of space. Nor is it solid, rather the Sun is mostly fluid. Therefore, there is not one single "Sun's magnetic field" but rather the aggregate of hundreds, thousands, or perhaps trillions of magnetic fields, each of which changes in complex ways and are affected by (and affect themselves) nearby fields. Thus, the aggregate field does not always resemble the simplification to one single large "Sun's magnetic field".
Note that the page the OP links to has a nice diagram which explains the "two south poles" phenomenon. During the process of the Sun's poles swap, for a short time the magnetic positive 'pole' shifts to the Sun's equator and both geographic poles have magnetic negative poles. Then the once-magnetically-negative geographic pole becomes positive and the equator no longer acts as a magnetic pole. I've never seen this mentioned anywhere else, and I'm sure that it is an oversimplification, but it does explain the "two south poles" statement.
