Solar enigma: Mysterious waves spotted on Sun moving at speeds that ‘defy explanation’

INA-  sources

A MYSTERIOUS set of waves have been identified moving within the Sun travelling at a speed that the physicists who revealed them have said presently "defies explanation".

The interior of the Sun — as with other stars — is not something that can be imaged by conventional astronomical methods like optical or X-ray telescopes. Accordingly, scientists rely on studies of the surface signature of various waves moving within the Sun to learn more about what happens inside the star, much like how geologists use seismic waves to infer the structure of the Earth’s interior. In this way, analysing the newly identified waves in the Sun could help improve our understanding of the nature and evolution of stars.

The study was undertaken by solar physicist Dr Chris Hanson of the New York University (NYU) Abu Dhabi’s Center for Space Science, and his colleagues.
To identify the waves, the team analysed 26 years’ worth of data collected by both ground and space-based telescopes.

The motions — dubbed high-frequency-retrograde vorticity waves — manifest themselves as a pattern of swirling vortices on the surface of the Sun, near the star’s equator, each of which forms a little cell.Each wave, the researchers said, moves the opposite direction to the Sun’s rotation, meaning that the motions in the star’s northern hemisphere are anti-symmetric to those seen in the southern hemisphere, and penetrate to a depth of three percent of the solar radius.