Seismic sounding of the solar core: Purging the corruption from the Sun's magnetic activity

Probing the structure and rotation of the solar core is one of the greatest challenges to helioseismology. We show that the seismic information in the observed low degree solar oscillations which probe the core is severely contaminated. This contamination arises from the Sun's near surface magnetic activity. The effect on the oscillation frequencies varies with the solar cycle-vanishing at solar minimum and growing with increasing surface activity. We demonstrate that this contamination can be quantified and removed after determining the fine structure of the entire oscillation spectrum.