SOLAR MODELS WITH ACCRETION. I. APPLICATION TO THE SOLAR ABUNDANCE PROBLEM

By A. Serenelli, Wick Haxton, C. Peña-Garay. 2011

206 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We generate new standard solar models using newly analyzed nuclear fusion cross sections and present results for helioseismic quantities and solar neutrino fluxes. The status of the solar abundance problem is discussed. We investigate whether nonstandard solar models with accretion from the protoplanetary disk might alleviate this problem. We examine a broad range of models, analyzing metal-enriched and metal-depleted accretion and three scenarios for the timing of accretion. Only partial solutions are found. For metal-rich accreted material (Zac ≳ 0.018) there exist combinations of accreted mass and metallicity that bring the depth of the convective zone into agreement with the helioseismic value. For the surface helium abundance, the helioseismic value is reproduced if metal-poor or metal-free accretion is assumed (Zac ≲ 0.09). In both cases a few percent of the solar mass must be accreted. Precise values depend on when accretion takes place. We do not find a simultaneous solution to both problems but speculate that changing the hydrogen-to-helium mass ratio in the accreted material may lead to more satisfactory solutions. We also show that, with current data, solar neutrinos are already a very competitive source of information about the solar core and can help constraining possible accretion histories. Even without helioseismic constraints, solar neutrinos rule out the possibility that more than 0.02 M☉ from the protoplanetary disk were accreted after the Sun settled on the main sequence. Finally, we discuss how measurements of neutrinos from the CN cycle could shed light on the interaction between the early Sun and its protoplanetary disk.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/491d71a0577d71feb4661b9ea1102ccda1b6d599

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. A. Serenelli
2. M. Maltoni
3. M. Gonzalez-Garcia
4. C. Peña-Garay
5. S. Basu
6. J. Laming
7. F. Villante
8. N. Vinyoles

Citations in the corpus

• The FIP and Inverse FIP Effects in Solar and Stellar Coronae (2015, background): “…due to data from the Opacity Project replacing older OPAL radiative opacities (Bahcall et al., 2005) might ease the problem, while variations to the solar evolutionary history with extra episodes of mass loss of accretion have also been considered (Guzik and Mussack, 2010; Serenelli et al., 2011).”
• Current Status and Future Prospects of the SNO+ Experiment (2015, unknown): “2%, constrained by the solar luminosity [2].”
• A New Generation of Standard Solar Models (2016, methodology): “In Serenelli et al. (2011) a generation of SSMs was computed using the nuclear reaction rates recommended in the Solar Fusion II paper (Adelberger et al. 2011; hereafter A11).”