Seismic Sounding of Convection in the Sun
Shravan Hanasoge, Laurent Gizon, Katepalli R. Sreenivasan

TL;DR
This paper reviews how helioseismology helps understand solar convection, revealing insights into the Sun's turbulent interior, its convective properties, and the differences from theoretical models, with implications for solar dynamics.
Contribution
It provides a comprehensive overview of helioseismic diagnostics of solar convection, highlighting recent findings and the challenges in reconciling observations with theoretical predictions.
Findings
Helioseismology suggests lower transport velocities than models predict.
Constraints on anisotropic Reynolds stresses inform solar convection dynamics.
Determination of the solar convection zone depth and internal rotation is advanced.
Abstract
Our Sun, primarily composed of ionized hydrogen and helium, has a surface temperature of 5777~K and a radius km. In the outer , energy transport is accomplished primarily by convection. Using typical convective velocities and kinematic viscosities of order ms, we obtain a Reynolds number . Convection is thus turbulent, causing a vast range of scales to be excited. The Prandtl number, , of the convecting fluid is very low, of order \,--\,, so that the Rayleigh number () is on the order of . Solar convection thus lies in extraordinary regime of dynamical parameters, highly untypical of fluid flows on Earth. Convective processes in the Sun drive global fluid circulations and magnetic fields, which in turn affect its visible outer…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
