Calculating the internal solar asphericity from frequency splitting measurements

✍ Scribed by J. R. Kuhn

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1989
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 282 KB
• Volume: 123
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0038-0938
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00150007

✦ Synopsis

Considerable effort and progress has been made in measuring the internal solar rotation from observations of the odd-order helioseismological splitting coefficients (cf. Brown and Morrow, 1987, and references therein). Less progress has been made in using the even coefficients to measure the internal solar structure (cf. Dnvall, Harvey, and Pomerantz, 1986; Dziembowski and Goode, 1984, and references). Yet, small deviations from spherical symmetry in the internal solar structure may be inferred from the helioseismological splitting observations. Spherical-harmonic decomposition and firstorder perturbation theory provide a convenient formalism for describing the distortion. Here I describe the formalism and a new, eomputationally efficient, method for calculating the kernel functions that are needed to invert the splitting data to obtain the structural asphericity.