The Sun’s supergranulation refers to a physical pattern covering the surface of the quiet Sun with a typical horizontal scale of approximately 30,000 km and a lifetime of around 1.8 d. Its most noticeable observable signature is as a fluctuating velocity field of 360 m s^t-1 rms whose components are mostly horizontal. Supergranulation was discovered more than fifty years ago, however explaining why and how it originates still represents one of the main challenges of modern solar physics.A lot of work has been devoted to the subject over the years, but observational constraints, conceptual difficulties and numerical limitations have all concurred to prevent a detailed understanding of the supergranulation phenomenon so far. With the advent of 21st century supercomputing resources and the availability of unprecedented high-resolution observations of the Sun, a stage at which key progress can be made has now been reached. A unifying strategy between observations and modelling is more than ever required for this to be possible.The primary aim of this review is therefore to provide readers with a detailed interdisciplinary description of past and current research on the problem, from the most elaborate observational strategies to recent theoretical and numerical modelling efforts that have all taken up the challenge of uncovering the origins of supergranulation. Throughout the text, we attempt to pick up the most robust findings so far, but we also outline the difficulties, limitations and open questions that the community has been confronted with over the years.In the light of the current understanding of the multiscale dynamics of the quiet photosphere, we finally suggest a tentative picture of supergranulation as a dynamical feature of turbulent magnetohydrodynamic convection in an extended spatial domain, with the aim of stimulating future research and discussions.

中文翻译：

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太阳的超级颗粒

太阳的超颗粒化是指覆盖安静太阳表面的物理模式，典型水平尺度约为30,000 km，寿命约为1.8 d。其最明显的可观察特征是360 ms ^t-1的波动速度场其成分大多为水平的均方根。超颗粒化是在五十多年前被发现的，但是解释其产生原因和方式仍然代表着现代太阳物理学的主要挑战之一。这些年来，人们已经为该问题做了很多工作，但是观察性的限制，概念上的困难和数值上的困难。到目前为止，都存在一些局限性，以至于无法详细了解超颗粒现象。随着21世纪超级计算资源的到来以及太阳空前的高分辨率观测的出现，现在已经可以取得关键的进展。观测与建模之间的统一策略比以往任何时候都更需要这样做。因此，本综述的主要目的是为读者提供关于该问题的过去和当前研究的详细的跨学科描述，从最详尽的观察策略到最近的理论和数值建模工作，这些工作都承担了揭开其起源的挑战。超颗粒化。在本文全文中，我们尝试收集迄今为止最有力的发现，但同时也概述了社区多年来面临的困难，局限性和未解决的问题。在安静的光球体中，我们最终提出了关于超颗粒化的初步图片，作为在扩展空间域中湍流磁流体动力对流的动力学特征，目的是激发未来的研究和讨论。