Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 March 2016
There have been several interesting developments during the last year with regard to global oscillations of the sun. However, because of the very full program of this Joint Discussion and the resulting tight schedule, only one point will be addressed here: the observational evidence for global oscillations of the sun with periods ≤ 1 hr and > 5 min.
The most decisive test currently available for identifying global oscillations is their examination for coherence of phase over an extended period of time. This test discriminates against both nonsolar phenomena, such as effects caused by observing through the earth’s atmosphere, and solar phenomena which occur in the frequency range of interest but which are not global oscillations of the sun. The search for this coherence has been conducted using 2 sets of observations from SCLERA, the 1973 observations of Hill and Stebbins (1975) and the 1978 observations described by Caudell et al. (1979). The results of these examinations strongly support the interpretation of the reported oscillations as solar in origin and as global in character.
The above observations consist of time chains of diameter measurements made at SCLERA. A list of references may be found in Hill and Stebbins (1975) and Hill (1978) which describe the telescope, the method for defining the solar diameter, the means of measuring the solar diameter, and the data reduction techniques used to produce the final Fourier transforms and associated power spectra of the diameter measurements.