Seismology of the Sun : Inference of Thermal, Dynamic and Magnetic Field Structures of the Interior

TL;DR

This paper reviews how helioseismology has advanced understanding of the sun's internal thermal, dynamic, and magnetic structures, highlighting recent observational discoveries and their implications for solar physics.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of the inferences about the sun's interior structures derived from helioseismology, integrating recent observational data.

Findings

Sun oscillates near 5-minute periodicity in millions of modes

Helioseismology reveals detailed internal thermal and magnetic structures

Advances improve understanding of solar influence on Earth's climate

Abstract

Recent overwhelming evidences show that the sun strongly influences the Earth's climate and environment. Moreover existence of life on this Earth mainly depends upon the sun's energy. Hence, understanding of physics of the sun, especially the thermal, dynamic and magnetic field structures of its interior, is very important. Recently, from the ground and space based observations, it is discovered that sun oscillates near 5 min periodicity in millions of modes. This discovery heralded a new era in solar physics and a separate branch called helioseismology or seismology of the sun has started. Before the advent of helioseismology, sun's thermal structure of the interior was understood from the evolutionary solution of stellar structure equations that mimicked the present age, mass and radius of the sun. Whereas solution of MHD equations yielded internal dynamics and magnetic field structure of the sun's interior. In this presentation, I review the thermal, dynamic and magnetic field structures of the sun's interior as inferred by the helioseismology.