New Solar Opacities, Abundances, Helioseismology, and Neutrino Fluxes

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

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We construct solar models with the newly calculated radiative opacities from the Opacity Project (OP) and with recently determined (lower) heavy-element abundances. We compare the results from the new models with the predictions of a series of models that use OPAL radiative opacities, older determinations of the surface heavy-element abundances, and refinements of nuclear reaction rates. For all the variations we consider, solar models that are constructed with the newer and lower heavy-element abundances advocated by Asplund et al. disagree by much more than the estimated measuring errors with the helioseismological determinations of the depth of the solar convective zone, the surface helium composition, the internal sound speeds, and the density profile. Using the new OP radiative opacities, the ratio of the 8B neutrino flux calculated with the older and larger heavy-element abundances (or with the newer and lower heavy-element abundances) to the total neutrino flux measured by the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory is 1.09 (0.87) with a 9% experimental uncertainty and a 16% theoretical uncertainty, 1 σ errors.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6eb21e4e7d7ad2f8be38c1f1b6bea3b7ae983d72

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

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).”
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).”
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.”
The Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment: Exploring Fundamental Symmetries of the Universe (2013, background): “Bottom: solar-neutrino fluxes from [309].”
Helioseismology and Solar Abundances (2007, methodology): “The further lowering of Z/X to 0.0165 by AGS05 changed the position of the convection-zone base further, and Bahcall et al. (2005c) found that models constructed with these abundances have rb = 0.729R⊙, a difference of about 32σ from the seismically determined value.”
NEW SOLAR COMPOSITION: THE PROBLEM WITH SOLAR MODELS REVISITED (2009, methodology): “…et al. 2009), and to question the revision of the solar abundances, particularly those of C, N, O, Ne and Ar whose fractional abundances cannot be determined from meteoritic samples (Antia & Basu 2005, 2006; Bahcall et al. 2005; Delahaye & Pinsonneault 2006; Basu & Antia 2008).”
The FIP and Inverse FIP Effects in Solar and Stellar Coronae (2015, background): “One early solution proposed was to increase the abundance of Ne to compensate (Antia and Basu, 2005; Bahcall et al., 2005a), by bringing the solar metallicity back to its prior value.”