Note to users. If you're seeing this message, it means that your browser cannot find this page's style/presentation instructions -- or possibly that you are using a browser that does not support current Web standards. Find out more about why this message is appearing, and what you can do to make your experience of our site the best it can be.

Science 29 May 2009:
Vol. 324. no. 5931, p. 1143
DOI: 10.1126/science.1170358
Prev | Table of Contents | Next

Technical Comments

Comment on "A Large Excess in Apparent Solar Oblateness Due to Surface Magnetism"

J. R. Kuhn,1,2,* M. Emilio,3 R. Bush4

Fivian et al. (Reports, 24 October 2008, p. 560) analyzed data from the Reuven Ramaty High-Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager satellite and reported that the Sun is more oblate than previous measurements have suggested. We argue that their threshold-based analysis yields a biased measure of the solar limb shape geometry.

1 Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii, Pukalani, Maui, HI 96760, USA.
2 Institute for Astronomy, Eidgenossische Technische Hochschale Zurich, HIT, CH-8093 Zurich, Switzerland.
3 Observatorio Astronomico, Departamento de Geociencias, Universidade Estadual de Ponta Grossa, Parana, Brazil.
4 Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: kuhn{at}ifa.hawaii.edu

Read the Full Text

To Advertise     Find Products

Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)