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Forty-five years ago, back in

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1968, two solar researchers

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George Simon and Nigel Weiss

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suggested that there ought to

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be these big giant cell flows

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on the sun.  In 1975, just a

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few years after that, I was a

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summer intern at what was then

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called Sacramento Peak

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Observatory in Sunspot New

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Mexico and my advisor that

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summer was George Simon.  So I

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show up at the beginning of

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the summer and George says

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“Let’s go look for giant cells.”

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Unfortunately, we didn’t have

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the data at the time so we, I

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spent much of the summer trying

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to figure out what they were

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and how we might try to find

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them. Over the years, I’ve

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developed techniques for

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trying to pull them out of

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the data, and the problem is

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these are really slow flows

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compared to everything else

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on the surface of the sun,

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normally 10-20 miles an hour

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when things are going around

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thousands of miles an hour.

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So they’re very difficult to

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see. Come ahead to this summer,

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I had a summer intern this

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summer. Owen Coldgrove shows

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up and my student Lisa Upton

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and I tell Owen “Let’s go look

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for giant cells.” So we spent

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the summer doing just that.

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The first half of the summer,

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unsuccessfully. We tried a

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technique that I had literally

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spent decades developing and

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it really didn’t work. So

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we tried another technique

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and first time, Owen came up

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to my office after running the

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programs over the night and

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when we looked at the data and

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we figured nah, this is it, we

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got it. We could see these

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big flow patterns on the surface

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of the sun that were persisting

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for months so we knew at that

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point, no we’ve got this.

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After 45 years of many people

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looking for it we finally

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found them. It was incredibly

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exciting to find these

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features on the sun. When we

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first found them, Owen and

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Dave and I were sitting in

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Dave’s office and we were

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looking at the latest set of

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data that we had run the

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analysis on, and when the

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picture popped up on the

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screen, we knew immediately

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exactly what we had found and

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it was high-fives all around.

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It was just such a thrilling

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experience to find these

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features that had been sought

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after for such a long time.

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One hope is that by tracing

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these flows and seeing how

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they’re related to the emergence

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of sunspots, that we may get a

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better handle on that,

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predicting sunspots. But we

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know, just from how other flows

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move magnetic fields around on

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the surface of the sun, that

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these flows will do that as

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well, and that influences the

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sunspot cycle: how big the next

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cycle’s going to be, it

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influences the structure of

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the magnetic field throughout

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the solar system, that it

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comes off of the sun with the

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solar wind and influences how

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it impacts the Earth, how it

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impacts our satellites in