No Arabic abstract
Iglesias et al. (2002) showed that the Rayleigh scattering from helium atoms decreases by collective effects in the atmospheres of cool white dwarf stars. Their study is here extended to consider an accurate evaluation of the atomic polarizability and the density effects involved in the Rayleigh cross section over a wide density-temperature region. The dynamic dipole polarizability of helium atoms in the ground state is determinated with the oscillator-strength distribution approach. The spectral density of oscillator strength considered includes most significant single and doubly excited transitions to discrete and continuum energies. Static and dynamic polarizability results are confronted with experiments and other theoretical evaluations shown a very good agreement. In addition, the refractive index of helium is evaluated with the Lorentz-Lorenz equation and shows a satisfactory agreement with the most recent experiments. The effect of spatial correlation of atoms on the Rayleigh scattering is calculated with Monte Carlo simulations and effective energy potentials that represent the particle interactions, covering fluid densities between 0.005 and a few g/cm$^3$ and temperatures between $1000$ K and $15000$ K. We provide analytical fits from which the Rayleigh cross section of fluid helium can be easily calculated at wavelength $lambda>505.35$ AA. Collision-induced light scattering was estimated to be the dominant scattering process at densities greater than 1-2 g/cm$^3$ depending on the temperature.
In a recent paper (Chabrier et al. 2019), we have derived a new equation of state (EOS) for dense hydrogen/helium mixtures which covers the temperature-density domain from solar-type stars to brown dwarfs and gaseous planets. This EOS is based on the so-called additive volume law and thus does not take into account the interactions between the hydrogen and helium species. In the present paper, we go beyond these calculations by taking into account H/He interactions, derived from quantum molecular dynamics simulations. These interactions, which eventually lead to H/He phase separation, become important at low temperature and high density, in the domain of brown dwarfs and giant planets. The tables of this new EOS are made publicly available.
Here we report on the first successful exoplanet transit observation with the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). We observed a single transit of the hot Jupiter HD 189733 b, obtaining two simultaneous primary transit lightcurves in the B and z bands as a demonstration of SOFIAs capability to perform absolute transit photometry. We present a detailed description of our data reduction, in particular the correlation of photometric systematics with various in-flight parameters unique to the airborne observing environment. The derived transit depths at B and z wavelengths confirm a previously reported slope in the optical transmission spectrum of HD 189733 b. Our results give new insights to the current discussion about the source of this Rayleigh scattering in the upper atmosphere and the question of fixed limb darkening coefficients in fitting routines.
Disks are essential to the formation of both stars and planets, but how they form in magnetized molecular cloud cores remains debated. This work focuses on how the disk formation is affected by turbulence and ambipolar diffusion (AD), both separately and in combination, with an emphasis on the protostellar mass accretion phase of star formation. We find that a relatively strong, sonic turbulence on the core scale strongly warps but does not completely disrupt the well-known magnetically-induced flattened pseudodisk that dominates the inner protostellar accretion flow in the laminar case, in agreement with previous work. The turbulence enables the formation of a relatively large disk at early times with or without ambipolar diffusion, but such a disk remains strongly magnetized and does not persist to the end of our simulation unless a relatively strong ambipolar diffusion is also present. The AD-enabled disks in laminar simulations tend to fragment gravitationally. The disk fragmentation is suppressed by initial turbulence. The ambipolar diffusion facilitates the disk formation and survival by reducing the field strength in the circumstellar region through magnetic flux redistribution and by making the field lines there less pinched azimuthally, especially at late times. We conclude that turbulence and ambipolar diffusion complement each other in promoting disk formation. The disks formed in our simulations inherit a rather strong magnetic field from its parental core, with a typical plasma-$beta$ of order a few tens or smaller, which is 2-3 orders of magnitude lower than the values commonly adopted in MHD simulations of protoplanetary disks. To resolve this potential tension, longer-term simulations of disk formation and evolution with increasingly more realistic physics are needed.
We present a new equation of state (EOS) for dense hydrogen/helium mixtures which covers a range of densities from $10^{-8}$ to $10^6$ g.cm$^{-3}$, pressures from $10^{-9}$ to $10^{13}$ GPa and temperatures from $10^{2}$ to $10^{8}$ K. The calculations combine the EOS of Saumon, Chabrier & vanHorn (1995) in the low density, low temperature molecular/atomic domain, the EOS of Chabrier & Potekhin (1998) in the high-density, high-temperature fully ionized domain, the limits of which differ for H and He, and ab initio quantum molecular dynamics (QMD) calculations in the intermediate density and temperature regime, characteristic of pressure dissociation and ionization. The EOS for the H/He mixture is based on the so-called additive volume law and thus does not take into account the interactions between the two species. A major improvement of the present calculations over existing ones is that we calculate the entropy over the entire density-temperature domain, a necessary quantity for stellar or planetary evolution calculations. The EOS results are compared with existing experimental data, namely Hugoniot shock experiments for pure H and He, and with first principle numerical simulations for both the single elements and the mixture. This new EOS covers a wide range of physical and astrophysical conditions, from jovian planets to solar-type stars, and recovers the existing relativistic EOS at very high densities, in the domains of white dwarfs and neutron stars.
In this work, we explore the dynamical impacts and observable signatures of two-fluid effects in the parameter regimes when ion-neutral collisions do not fully couple the neutral and charged fluids. The purpose of this study is to deepen our understanding of the RTI and the effects of the partial ionization on the development of RTI using non-linear two-fluid numerical simulations. Our two-fluid model takes into account neutral viscosity, thermal conductivity, and collisional interaction between neutrals and charges: ionization/recombination, energy and momentum transfer, and frictional heating. In this paper II, the sensitivity of the RTI dynamics to collisional effects for different magnetic field configurations supporting the prominence thread is explored. This is done by artificially varying, or eliminating, effects of both elastic and inelastic collisions by modifying the model equations. We find that ionization and recombination reactions between ionized and neutral fluids, if in equilibrium prior to the onset of the instability, do not substantially impact the development of the primary RTI. However, such reactions can impact development of secondary structures during mixing of the cold prominence and hotter surrounding coronal material. We find that collisionality within and between ionized and neutral particle populations play an important role in both linear and non-linear development of RTI, with ion-neutral collision frequency as the primary determining factor in development or damping of small scale structures. We also observe that degree and signatures of flow decoupling between ion and neutral fluids can depend both on the inter-particle collisionality and the magnetic field configuration of the prominence thread.