Modelling the convection zone

DOI

The base of the convection zone (CZ) is a source of acoustic glitches in the asteroseismic frequency spectra of solar-like oscillators, allowing one to precisely measure the acoustic depth to the feature. We examine the sensitivity of the depth of the CZ to mass, stellar abundances, and input physics, and in particular, the use of a measurement of the acoustic depth to the CZ as an atmosphere-independent, absolute measure of stellar metallicities. We find that for low-mass stars on the main sequence with 0.4M_{sun}<=M<=1.6M{sun}, the acoustic depth to the base of the CZ, normalized by the acoustic depth to the center of the star, {tau}_cz,n, is both a strong function of mass, and varies at the 0.5%-1% per 0.1 dex level in [Z/X], and is therefore also a sensitive probe of the composition. We estimate the theoretical uncertainties in the stellar models and show that combined with reasonable observational uncertainties we can expect to measure the metallicity to within 0.15-0.3 dex for solar-like stars. We discuss the applications of this work to rotational mixing, particularly in the context of the observed mid-F star Li dip, and to distinguishing between different mixtures of heavy elements.

Identifier
DOI http://doi.org/10.26093/cds/vizier.17460016
Source https://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/lp/custom/CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/746/16
Related Identifier https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/ApJ/746/16
Related Identifier http://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/ApJ/746/16
Metadata Access http://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/pmh/pubreg.xml?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_b2find&identifier=ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/746/16
Provenance
Creator van Saders J.L.; Pinsonneault M.H.
Publisher CDS
Publication Year 2013
Rights https://cds.unistra.fr/vizier-org/licences_vizier.html
OpenAccess true
Contact CDS support team <cds-question(at)unistra.fr>
Representation
Resource Type Dataset; AstroObjects
Discipline Astrophysics and Astronomy; Interdisciplinary Astronomy; Natural Sciences; Observational Astronomy; Physics; Stellar Astronomy