Rossby waves on the Sun as revealed by solar `hills'

Details Rossby waves on the Sun as revealed by solar `hills' Rossby waves on the Sun as revealed by solar `hills'

Jun 2000

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2000natur.405..544k&link_type=abstract

Nature, Volume 405, Issue 6786, pp. 544-546 (2000).

Physics

26

Scientific paper

It is a long-standing puzzle that the Sun's photosphere-its visible surface-rotates differentially, with the equatorial regions rotating faster than the poles. It has been suggested that waves analogous to terrestrial Rossby waves, and known as r-mode oscillations, could explain the Sun's differential rotation: Rossby waves are seen in the oceans as large-scale (hundreds of kilometres) variations of sea-surface height (5-cm-high waves), which propagate slowly either east or west (they could take tens of years to cross the Pacific Ocean). Calculations show that the solar r-mode oscillations have properties that should be strongly constrained by differential rotation. Here we report the detection of 100-m-high `hills' in the photosphere, spaced uniformly over the Sun's surface with a spacing of (8.7 +/- 0.6) × 104km. If convection under the photosphere is organized by the r-modes, the observed corrugated photosphere is a probable surface manifestation of these solar oscillations.

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