Sun's Core Rotates 4 Times Faster Than Surface

Scientists had assumed before that the core was rotating like a merry-go-round at about the same speed as the surface.

"The most likely explanation is that this core rotation is left over from the period when the sun formed, some 4.6 billion years ago," said Roger Ulrich, a UCLA professor emeritus of astronomy, who has studied the sun's interior for more than 40 years and co-author of the study that was published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

"It's a surprise, and exciting to think we might have uncovered a relic of what the sun was like when it first formed," he added.

The rotation of the solar core may give a clue to how the sun formed. After the sun formed, the solar wind likely slowed the rotation of the outer part of the sun, he said. The rotation might also impact sunspots, which also rotate, Ulrich said. Sunspots can be enormous; a single sunspot can even be larger than the Earth.

The researchers studied surface acoustic waves in the sun's atmosphere, some of which penetrate to the sun's core, where they interact with gravity waves that have a sloshing motion similar to how water would move in a half-filled tanker truck driving on a curvy mountain road. From those observations, they detected the sloshing motions of the solar core. By carefully measuring the acoustic waves, the researchers precisely determined the time it takes an acoustic wave to travel from the surface to the center of the sun and back again. That travel time turns out to be influenced a slight amount by the sloshing motion of the gravity waves, Ulrich said.

The core of the sun differs from its surface in another way as well. The core has a temperature of approximately 29 million degrees Fahrenheit, which is 15.7 million Kelvin. The sun's surface is "only" about 30,000 degrees Fahrenheit, or 5,800 Kelvin.