Magnetohydrodynamics and Solar Physics

TL;DR

This review discusses recent advances in solar physics, focusing on solar wind, dynamo, photosphere dynamics, and stellar comparisons, highlighting the limitations of current numerical simulations due to high computational demands.

Contribution

It provides an overview of recent progress in understanding solar phenomena and emphasizes the computational challenges in simulating solar processes.

Findings

Numerical simulations of supergranules are extremely computationally demanding.

Current technology cannot fully simulate solar flow structures.

The review highlights key unresolved questions in solar physics.

Abstract

In this short review, I present some of the recent progresses on the pending questions of solar physics. These questions let us revisit the solar wind, the solar dynamo problem, the dynamics of the photosphere and finally have a glimpse at other solar type stars. Discussing the use of direct numerical simulations in solar physics, I show that the full numerical calculation of the flow in a single supergranule would require more electric power than the luminosity of the sun itself with present computer technology.