Mathematics Colloquium

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Unusual aspects of solar convection

Speaker: Katepalli Sreenivasan, NYU

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 1302

Date: Monday, October 1, 2018, 3:45 p.m.

Synopsis:

This talk is about turbulent convection in the Sun, which is the dominant mode of heat transport outwards of 70% of its radius. Given the dimensions of the Sun (radius = 7 x 108 m), all plausible estimates of flow parameters such as the Rayleigh and Reynolds numbers suggest that the convective motion is highly turbulent. But the medium is severely stratified (many orders of magnitude variation in density), the Prandtl number is very low (10-6 or lower), the deviation from adiabaticity is minuscule (10-5 or smaller), etc. An attempt will be made to assess the effects of some of these unusual features derived from the standard solar model. The major goal is to point out the major lacunae.