LOW-LATITUDE ACTIVE LONGITUDES ON THE SUN AND IN INTERPLANETARY SPACE

Following a short review of the history of the development of the active longitude concept, we reprocessed several graphs of the longitudinal distribution of various low-latitude phenomena of solar activity published by various authors. We calculated the inclinations of the active longitudes found. A summary picture of all these inclinations demonstrates the concentration of such active longitudes into two main directions. Two values of synodic rotation: 26.77 days and 27.16 days, corresponding to these two types of low-latitude active longitudes, rotating faster than Carrington's rotation. The summary graph of all active longitudes belonging to these two types shows that active longitudes of different activity phenomena and from different authors overlap to a relatively high degree and that they run at least through three eleven-year cycles. The first of these active longitudes moves around the whole Sun in about 45-55 rotations and the second one in about 200 Carrington's rotations. We believe that both these low-latitude active longitudes have their reflections in the two main inclinations of the interplanetary magnetic field sector boundaries demonstrated by Svalgaard and Wilcox (1975), their synodic rotations being 26.84 days and 27.14 days.