Helioseismological Implications of Recent Solar Abundance Determinations

By J. Bahcall, S. Basu, M. Pinsonneault, A. Serenelli. 2004

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We show that standard solar models are in good agreement with the helioseismologically determined sound speed and density as a function of solar radius, the depth of the convective zone, and the surface helium abundance, as long as those models do not incorporate the most recent heavy-element abundance determinations. However, sophisticated new analyses of the solar atmosphere infer lower abundances of the lighter metals (like C, N, O, Ne, and Ar) than the previously widely used surface abundances. We show that solar models that include the lower heavy-element abundances disagree with the solar profiles of sound speed and density as well as the depth of the convective zone and the helium abundance. The disagreements for models with the new abundances range from factors of several to many times the quoted uncertainties in the helioseismological measurements. The disagreements are at temperatures that are too low to affect significantly solar neutrino emission. If errors in the calculated OPAL opacities are solely responsible for the disagreements, then the corrections in the opacity must extend from 2 × 106 K (R = 0.7 R☉) to 5 × 106 K (R = 0.4 R☉), with opacity increases of the order of 10%.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/00b4480e0becd8d53cfd36924d86f9df1e6d8c72

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Citations in the corpus

10,000 Standard Solar Models: A Monte Carlo Simulation (2005, methodology): “Our best standard solar models (Bahcall et al. 2005b) have approximately 2000 radial mesh points.”
MODULES FOR EXPERIMENTS IN STELLAR ASTROPHYSICS (MESA) (2010, background): “Values for the solar age, mass, radius, and luminosity are taken from Bahcall et al. (2005).”
MESA ISOCHRONES AND STELLAR TRACKS (MIST). I. SOLAR-SCALED MODELS (2016, background): “One resolution invokes increased opacity, an idea that has been quantitatively explored by several authors (e.g., Bahcall et al. 2005a; Christensen-Dalsgaard et al. 2009; Serenelli et al. 2009).”
YREC: the Yale rotating stellar evolution code (2007, background): “In particular, the important series of papers by Bahcall et al. (2004, 2005) on solar neutrinos, helioseismology and solar abundances also made use of a dedicated version of YREC.”
Accurate Empirical Radii and Masses of Planets and Their Host Stars with Gaia Parallaxes (2016, result): “While a seemingly impenetrable success of SSMs, a later revised estimate of the oxygen abundance of the Sun (Allende Prieto et al. 2001; Asplund et al. 2009), resulted in predictions for helioseismology from SSMs that were grossly inconsistent with observations (Bahcall et al. 2005).”
A New Generation of Standard Solar Models (2016, background): “This solar abundance problem (Basu & Antia 2004; Bahcall et al. 2005b; Delahaye & Pinsonneault 2006) has defied a complete solution.”
Improvements to stellar structure models, based on a grid of 3D convection simulations. II. Calibrating the mixing-length formulation (2014, background): “8.1 (the source of the so-called solar abundance problem (Bahcall et al. 2005) lies in the importance of the O opacity at the bottom of the solar convection zone).”
HOW TO CONSTRAIN YOUR M DWARF: MEASURING EFFECTIVE TEMPERATURE, BOLOMETRIC LUMINOSITY, MASS, AND RADIUS (2015, background): “…solar models, yield disagreements with the sound speed profile in the solar convective envelope, the lower boundary of solar convection zone inferred from helioseismic inversions, and the solar surface helium abundance (e.g., Bahcall et al. 2005; Delahaye & Pinsonneault 2006; Basu & Antia 2008).”
SOLAR MODELS WITH ACCRETION. I. APPLICATION TO THE SOLAR ABUNDANCE PROBLEM (2011, methodology): “…abundance determinations have been questioned (Antia & Basu 2005, 2006; Bahcall et al. 2005b; Delahaye & Pinsonneault 2006; Delahaye et al. 2010) and the constitutive physics of solar models has been revised (Basu & Antia 2004; Montalbán et al. 2004; Bahcall et al. 2005a; Guzik & Mussack 2010).”
The ACS Survey of Galactic Globular Clusters. II. Stellar Evolution Tracks, Isochrones, Luminosity Functions, and Synthetic Horizontal-Branch Models (2007, methodology): “For future reference, the solar abundances were adopted from Grevesse & Sauval (1998) and global solar parameters luminosity, radius, surface composition, and age from Bahcall et al. (2005).”
A UNIFIED REPRESENTATION OF GAS-PHASE ELEMENT DEPLETIONS IN THE INTERSTELLAR MEDIUM (2009, result): “Knauth, et al. (2003) claimed to have detected progressively stronger depletions of nitrogen as N(H) increased, but this effect may be indirectly related to an apparent enhancement of Ngas/Ogas within 500 pc of the Sun discussed by Knauth et al. (2006).”
A BUDGET AND ACCOUNTING OF METALS AT z ∼ 0: RESULTS FROM THE COS-HALOS SURVEY (2013, methodology): “We adopt Z⊙ ≡ MZ,⊙/M⊙ = 0.0153 from Caffau et al. (2011) and show the range of Z⊙ = 0.013 to 0.0168 from Bahcall et al. (2005) as possible sources of uncertainty.”
New Solar Opacities, Abundances, Helioseismology, and Neutrino Fluxes (2004, background): “A number of authors have pointed out that these lower heavy element abundances lead to solar models that conflict with different aspects of helioseismological measurements (e.g., Bahcall & Pinsonneault 2004, Basu & Antia 2004, Bahcall et al. 2005).”
A High-Resolution Survey of Low-Redshift QSO Absorption Lines: Statistics and Physical Conditions of O VI Absorbers (2007, background): “We note that these abundances are currently a topic of debate (e.g., Basu & Antia 2004; Bahcall et al. 2005a,b), and the solar C and O abundances could be ≈ 0.2 dex higher.”