After four decades of searching, solar scientists have at long last found evidence of a type of seismic wave in our Sun, thanks to ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO. These low-frequency waves, called g-modes, reveal that the solar core is rotating some four times faster than the solar surface.
“This is certainly the biggest result of SOHO in the last decade, and one of SOHO’s all-time top discoveries,” said Bernhard Fleck, ESA’s SOHO project scientist based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Just like seismologists use the way earthquakes travel through Earth’s interior to study our planet’s structure, solar physicists use helioseismology to study the Sun’s interior structure by tracking the way waves move throughout the star. Unlike Earth, where seismic events are typically distinct, the Sun is constantly ringing with sound waves because of the continuous convection of solar material going on beneath the surface.
Source & further reading:https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/esa-nasa-s-soho-reveals-rapidly-rotating-solar-core
Credits: ESA
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