SOLA inversions for the core structure of solar-type stars

Abstract

The Subtractive Optimally Localized Averages (SOLA) method, developed and extensively used in helioseismology, is applied to artificial data to obtain measures of the sound speed inside a solar-type star. In contrast to inversion methods which fit models to some aspect of the data, methods such as SOLA provide an honest assessment of what can truly be resolved using seismic data, without introducing additional assumptions such as that the space of admissible stellar models is small. The resulting measures obtained from SOLA inversion can subsequently be used to eliminate putative stellar models. Here we present results of experiments to test the reliability of SOLA inferences using solar models and models of solar-type stars.