Global Circulation of the Sun: Where are we and where are we going?

Abstract

There are several goals I hope to reach in this talk. First, I would like to give this broad audience some idea of our present state of knowledge concerning global circulation of the sun—what the observations tell us (and don’t tell us!) as well as current theories. This will comprise a large part of my talk. In doing this, I hope I do not bore the specialists in this area. Second, I would like to put the problem of global circulation of the sun in the broader context of “solar variability”, a topic of rapidly growing interest in the solar community, that has implications for stars generally, and which may not have caught the attention of the stellar community. I would like also to put the solar circulation problem in the context of stellar rotation, by making a few admittedly speculative extrapolations to other stars. In addition, I will give a few of my own opinions about what we should be doing in the near future to make more progress in understanding the solar problem. And finally, I hope to provoke a wide ranging discussion of the whole area of circulation and variability in the sun and stars.