Jeff Kuhn
Michigan State University

What Makes the Sun a Variable Star  -- New Helioseismic, Photometric
and Numerical Insights


On short timescales we tend to think of Main Sequence stars as static, 
one-dimensional astrophysical building blocks. In fact, we now know that 
the large scale solar structure is neither spherically symmetric, nor static. 
While many of these perturbations are subtle they are profound enough to 
suggest important problems in our understanding of stellar convection and 
rotation. Stellar convection is a difficult, multi-scale problem, linking 
widely separated time and length scales, but through recent advances in 
photometry, helioseismology, and numerical simulation a new understanding of
some of these longstanding problems has been generated.