The Sun

The Sun rings like a bell. Millions of acoustic modes propagate through its interior, each one carrying a fingerprint of the medium it traversed. For thirty years, helioseismology has exploited this fact to measure the Sun's internal rotation, sound-speed profile, and helium abundance — but the field hit a wall. Convective velocities predicted by models are an order of magnitude larger than what observations reveal.

Our work focuses on resolving this 'convection conundrum' using deep inversion methods and convolutional neural networks trained on simulated solar oscillations. Recent results — published in Nature Astronomy — identified global-scale Rossby waves and magnetically modified oscillation modes that earlier analyses had overlooked.