Testing turbulent convection theory in solar models – I. Structure of the solar convection zone |
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| Authors: | Y Li J Y Yang |
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| Institution: | National Astronomical Observatories/Yunnan Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, PO Box 110, Kunming 650011, China;Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100039, China |
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| Abstract: | Turbulent convection models (TCMs) based on hydrodynamic moment equations are compared with the classical mixing-length theory (MLT) in solar models. The aim is to test the effects of some physical processes on the structure of the solar convection zone, such as the dissipation, diffusion and anisotropy of turbulence that have been ignored in the MLT. Free parameters introduced by the TCMs are also tested in order to find appropriate values for astrophysical applications. It is found that the TCMs usually give larger convective heat fluxes than the MLT does, and the heat transport efficiency is sensitively related to the dissipation parameters used in the TCMs. As a result of calibrating to the present solar values, our solar models usually have rather smaller values of the mixing length to local pressure scaleheight ratio than the standard solar model. The turbulent diffusion is found to have important effects on the structure of the solar convection zone. It leads to significantly lowered and expanded profiles for the Reynolds correlations, and a larger temperature gradient in the central part of the superadiabatic convection region but a smaller one near the boundaries of the convection zone. It is interesting to note that, due to a careful treatment of turbulence developing towards isotropic state, our non-local TCM results in radially dominated motion in the central part and horizontally dominated motion near the boundaries of the convection zone, just as what has been observed in many 3D numerical simulations. Our solar models with the TCMs give small but meaningful differences in the temperature and sound speed profiles compared with the standard solar model using the MLT. |
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| Keywords: | convection turbulence Sun: evolution Sun: interior stars: interiors |
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