Seismological challenges for stellar structure

TL;DR

This paper discusses the current challenges in understanding stellar and solar interior structures through seismology, highlighting issues with solar composition, rotation, and stellar core modeling, and emphasizing the complexity of interpreting asteroseismic data.

Contribution

It reviews the seismological challenges faced in solar and stellar structure studies, emphasizing unresolved issues and future prospects in asteroseismic research.

Findings

Uncertainties in solar surface composition affect interior models.

Understanding solar rotation remains incomplete.

Asteroseismic data will challenge existing stellar models.

Abstract

Helioseismology has provided very detailed information about the solar interior, and extensive data on a large number of stars, although at less detail, are promised by the ongoing and upcoming asteroseismic projects. In the solar case there remain serious challenges in understanding the inferred solar structure, particularly in the light of the revised determinations of the solar surface composition. Also, a secure understanding of the origins of solar rotation as inferred from helioseismology, both in the radiative interior and in the convection zone, is still missing. In the stellar case challenges are certain to appear as the data allow more detailed inferences of the properties of stellar cores. Large remaining uncertainties in modelling concerns the properties of convective cores and other processes that may cause mixing. As a result of developing asteroseismic signatures addressing these and other issues, we can look forward to a highly challenging, and hence exciting, era of stellar astrophysics.