Solar Inertial Modes

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent observations and modeling of the Sun's inertial modes, highlighting their sensitivity to internal solar properties and their influence on solar rotation and structure.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive summary of recent advances in understanding solar inertial modes through observations and both linear and nonlinear models.

Findings

Inertial modes are highly sensitive to solar differential rotation.

Modeling advances improve understanding of deep solar convection zone.

Inertial modes influence large-scale solar dynamics.

Abstract

The Sun's global inertial modes are very sensitive to the solar differential rotation and to properties of the deep solar convection zone which are currently poorly constrained. These properties include the superadiabatic temperature gradient, the latitudinal entropy gradient, and the turbulent viscosity. The inertial modes also play a key role in controlling the Sun's large-scale structure and dynamics, in particular the solar differential rotation. This paper summarizes recent observations and advances in the (linear and nonlinear) modeling of the solar inertial modes.