The SOI Solar Rotation Video

A 235-frame video shows the solar sphere and various aspects of its rotation. Highlighted is the Sun's angular rotation, a cut-away displaying the internal plasma river flows, the newly-discovered polar jets, and the polar flow currents. The data are shown in false color projected onto a sphere.

• Solar Rotation (SGI) (30.1Mb SGI movie format)
• Solar Rotation (mpeg) (2.5Mb mpeg -- poorer colors but much smaller file)

The image frames are available as SGI .rgb files and as .tiff files. See the directories srot_rgb and srot_tiff respectively. The "tiff" files are also available in a tar file.

Images are available as sets of 100, 10, 10, 10, 100, 5 frames respectively, for 235 frames total. The 5 images shown below are frames 0, 110, 120, 130, 230. The animation sequences are frames 0-110 and 121-230.

The primary data shown in the movie are derived from the angular velocity data from the 2dRLS inversion of solar oscillation frequencies. For detailed discussions of the methods used see: "Structure and Rotation of the Solar Interior: Initial Results from the MDI Medium-l Program", Solar Physics, 1997, in press.

(Video Credit: Philip H. Scherrer, Stanford University)