Solar ripples should shed light on sun's birth
Waves propagating outward from the sun’s core are helping real the sun’s secrets.
Since the 17th century, when Galileo first observed sunspots through his early telescope, scientists have used advancing technology to uncover the secrets of the stars.
Rafael Garcia: Learning the history of our sun is the first step to learn the history of the stars.
That was astronomer Rafael Garcia in France. He spoke of what scientists call gravity modes. These are waves inside the sun that originate at the sun’s interior and propagate from the core outwards. These tiny ripples were predicted 30 years ago. Now a solar probe-and-satellite called SOHO has detected them, at the end of their journey, right on the solar surface. The waves are similar to those that form when you drop a stone into a pond.
Until 2007, little was known about the sun’s interior. But because these waves travel through all the different solar layers, astronomers can use them to peek inside the sun. The core is thought to be rotating between 3 and 5 times faster than the outer layers. This study of the sun’s core should help reveal how our sun and solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago.
Rafael Garcia: These results agree with known theory but doesn’t agree perfectly, so we still have to improve the models to have better results, better matching and then improve our knowledge of the sun and stellar physics.
Our thanks to Research Corporation, America’s first foundation for science advancement.
Gosh, I really don’t understand gravity! Does anyone? Like, is it something that science has completely explained?
Well every thing has a gravitational pull. Even a bowl of cerial effects a spoon next to it. Each object in the Universe pulls on eachother except not very strongly. Except objects that are very far away and light from each of them has not reached each other. This means they are not affected by each others gravity because gravity travels at the speed of light.