Abstract
Observations of short-term irradiance variations and consideration of mechanisms of the solar activity cycle suggest the possibility of long-term variation of the solar flux. Since the limb darkening is sensitive to effective temperature and convective efficiency, observations of the solar limb darkening may provide a useful means to detect and study long-term global variations. The limb-darkening responses to impulsive variation (in depth) of the source function, to effective temperature variation, and to convection variations are presented. For the variations considered, the limb-darkening variation is approximately linearly proportional to the associated parameters. The minimum detectable amplitude of those parametric variations is derived as a function of observational noise. Given our demonstrated errors of observation, single-parameter sensitivies are 3 K for effective temperature variation and 0.007 for local mixing-length variation for year to year changes at 99% confidence.
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Petro, L.D., Foukal, P.V. & Kurucz, R.L. Photospheric limb-darkening signatures of global structure variations. Sol Phys 98, 23–38 (1985). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00177196
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00177196