What lies beneath those dark sunspots? How do they stay for weekes or more despite being comprised of concentrated magnetic fields that naturally repel each other? Thanks to the Michealson Doppler Imager (MDI) aboard the Solar and Heleospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft scientists were able to solve a long standing mystery and peer inside to see swirling flows of electrified gas (plasma). It creates a self reinforcing cycle which holds it all together. This may help deepen understnading of active regions on the sun that threaten high-tech systems at Earth with solar storms.
This NASA edited video index with information slates and SOHO images attempts to explain the phenomena that are sunspots and the suns solar cycle.

18:00:35 Anatomy of a sunspot
Why are sunspots so much coller than the solar surface (photosphere)? Thanks to a method similar to an ultrasound, scientists found much hotter temperatures below the spot seem to get trapped by magnetic fields forming a virtual bottleneck, making the spot much cooler than the surface. In the visualisation, completely created from data of a June 1998 sunspot: red is hottest, followed by yellow: purple is cold.
18:00:57 Animation to show temperatures in and surrounding a sunspot.
18:01:22 Internal Ebb & Flow
How do sunspots remain intact with concentrated magnetic fields repelling each other? For the first time scientists have been able to confirm theories that inward flows of material stabalize the sunspot's structure. With the MDI instrument, they oberved the flows seen here in an animation based on the June 1998 sunspot.
18:01:44 Animation showing sunspot structure.
18:03:11 What is a sunspot?
Sunspots appear dark because they are cooler than the solar surface due to a