Institut für Astronomie und Astrophysik Abteilung Astronomie Sand 1, D-72076 Tübingen, Germany
Hinweis: Einige Seiten auf astro.uni-tuebingen.de können veraltet sein und werden nicht mehr aktualisiert. Note: Some webpages at astro.uni-tuebingen.de may be outdated and will no longer be updated.

ASSET: Advanced Spectrum Synthesis 3D Tool. Calculating the Spectra of the Sun (and other Cool Stars) from Hydro-Models

Lars Koesterke, University of  Texas,  09.06.2009, 17:00  Room A 104

Abstract: In recent years, several groups have independently developed and matured 3D Radiation-Hydro models for the convection zones and the photospheres of cool stars. A subsequent re-examination of the solar spectrum based on these models has led to a drastic revision of the solar abundances of e.g. Oxygen, which has spurred an ongoing and very controversial debate on the validity of the new models and on the severe consequences of the much lower Oxygen abundance.

Due to the lack of modern software for the spectrum synthesis these studies have so far been limited to very short pieces of the spectrum, i.e. single lines or small blends. In the first part of the talk I will present the new Advanced Spectrum Synthesis 3D Tool (ASSET) that is based on a full-fledged radiation transfer scheme in 3 dimensions. ASSET features arbitrarily complex opacities with molecules, scattering, and "by the book" higher-order interpolations and radiation transfer. Moreover, ASSET imposes no principal limits on the wavelength range covered by one calculation. The code is fully parallelized with OpenMP and MPI and runs very efficiently on multi-CPU, multi-core workstations as well as on clusters.

In the second part of my talk I will compare the results from ASSET with the results derived from a different approach that is based on 1D radiation transfer methods augmented by a scheme to rotate the input model to calculate intensities for arbitrary angles. I will discuss the limitations of the two approaches in terms of accuracy and speed, and present a comparison with observations.

Heidrun Oberndörffer | Impressum Last modified 28 Apr 2009