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Register a new userStudy of the Dynamics of Convective Turbulence in the Solar Granulation by Spectral Line Broadening and Asymmetry
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In the quiet regions on the solar surface, turbulent convective motions of granulation play an important role in creating small-scale magnetic structures, as well as in energy injection into the upper atmosphere. The turbulent nature of granulation can be studied using spectral line profiles, especially line broadening, which contains information on the flow field smaller than the spatial resolution of an instrument. Moreover, the Doppler velocity gradient along a line-of-sight (LOS) causes line broadening as well. However, the quantitative relationship between velocity gradient and line broadening has not been understood well. In this study, we perform bisector analyses using the spectral profiles obtained using the Spectro-Polarimeter of the Hinode/Solar Optical Telescope to investigate the relationship of line broadening and bisector velocities with the granulation flows. The results indicate that line broadening has a positive correlation with the Doppler velocity gradients along the LOS. We found excessive line broadening in fading granules, that cannot be explained only by the LOS velocity gradient, although the velocity gradient is enhanced in the process of fading. If this excessive line broadening is attributed to small-scale turbulent motions, the averaged turbulent velocity is obtained as 0.9 km/s.
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The calculation of line widths constitutes theoretical and computational challenges in the calculation of opacities of hot dense plasmas. Opacity models use line broadening approximations that are untested at stellar interior conditions. Moreover, calculations of atomic spectra of the sun, indicate a large discrepancy in the K-shell line widths between several atomic codes and the OP. In this work, the atomic code STAR is used to study the sensitivity of solar opacities to line-broadening. Variations in the solar opacity profile, due to an increase of the Stark widths resulting from discrepancies with OP, are compared, in light of the solar opacity problem, with the required opacity variations of the present day sun, as imposed by helioseismic and neutrino observations. The resulting variation profile, is much larger than the discrepancy between different atomic codes, agrees qualitatively with the missing opacity profile, recovers about half of the missing opacity nearby the convection boundary and has a little effect in the internal regions. Since it is hard to estimate quantitatively the uncertainty in the Stark widths, we show that an increase of all line widths by a factor of about 100 recovers quantitatively the missing opacity. These results emphasize the possibility that photoexcitation processes are not modeled properly, and more specifically, highlight the need for a better theoretical characterization of the line broadening phenomena at stellar interior conditions and of the uncertainty due to the way it is implemented by atomic codes.
In incorporating the effect of atmospheric turbulence in the broadening of spectral lines, the so-called radial-tangential macroturbulence (RTM) model has been widely used in the field of solar-type stars, which was devised from an intuitive appearance of granular velocity field of the Sun. Since this model assumes that turbulent motions are restricted to only radial and tangential directions, it has a special broadening function with notably narrow width due to the projection effect, the validity of which has not yet been confirmed in practice. With an aim to check whether this RTM model adequately represents the actual solar photospheric velocity field, we carried out an extensive study on the non-thermal velocity dispersion along the line-of-sight (V_los) by analyzing spectral lines at various points of the solar disk based on locally-averaged as well as high spatial-resolution spectra, and found the following results. First, the center-to-limb run of V_los derived from ground-based low-resolution spectra is simply monotonic with a slightly increasing tendency, which contradicts the specific trend (an appreciable peak at theta~45 deg) predicted from RTM. Second, the V_los values derived from a large number of spectra based on high-resolution space observation revealed to follow a nearly normal distribution, without any sign of peculiar distribution expected for the RTM case. These two observational facts indicate that the actual solar velocity field is not such simply dichotomous as assumed in RTM, but directionally more chaotic. We thus conclude that RTM is not an adequate model at least for solar-type stars, which would significantly overestimate the turbulent velocity dispersion by a factor of ~2. The classical Gaussian macroturbulence model should be more reasonable in this respect.
The broadening of the hydrogen lines during flares is thought to result from increased charge (electron, proton) density in the flare chromosphere. However, disagreements between theory and modeling prescriptions have precluded an accurate diagnostic of the degree of ionization and compression resulting from flare heating in the chromosphere. To resolve this issue, we have incorporated the unified theory of electric pressure broadening of the hydrogen lines into the non-LTE radiative transfer code RH. This broadening prescription produces a much more realistic spectrum of the quiescent, A0 star Vega compared to the analytic approximations used as a damping parameter in the Voigt profiles. We test recent radiative-hydrodynamic (RHD) simulations of the atmospheric response to high nonthermal electron beam fluxes with the new broadening prescription and find that the Balmer lines are over-broadened at the densest times in the simulations. Adding many simultaneously heated and cooling model loops as a multithread model improves the agreement with the observations. We revisit the three-component phenomenological flare model of the YZ CMi Megaflare using recent and new RHD models. The evolution of the broadening, line flux ratios, and continuum flux ratios are well-reproduced by a multithread model with high-flux nonthermal electron beam heating, an extended decay phase model, and a hot spot atmosphere heated by an ultrarelativistic electron beam with reasonable filling factors: 0.1%, 1%, and 0.1% of the visible stellar hemisphere, respectively. The new modeling motivates future work to understand the origin of the extended gradual phase emission.
Observations of the sun suggest that solar activities systematically create north-south hemispheric asymmetries. For instance, the hemisphere in which the sunspot activity is more active tends to switch after the early half of each solar cycle. Svalgaard & Kamide (2013) recently pointed out that the time gaps of polar field reversal between the north and south hemispheres are simply consequences of the asymmetry of sunspot activity. However, the mechanism underlying the asymmetric feature in solar cycle activities is not yet well understood. In this paper, in order to explain the cause of the asymmetry from the theoretical point of view, we investigate the relationship between the dipole- and quadrupole-type components of the magnetic field in the solar cycle using the mean-field theory based on the flux transport dynamo model. As a result, we found that there are two different attractors of the solar cycle, in which either the north or the south polar field is first reversed, and that the flux transport dynamo model well explains the phase-asymmetry of sunspot activity and the polar field reversal without any ad hoc source of asymmetry.
Atmospheric haze is the leading candidate for the flattening of expolanetary spectra, as its also an important source of opacity in the atmospheres of solar system planets, satellites, and comets. Exoplanetary transmission spectra, which carry information about how the planetary atmospheres become opaque to stellar light in transit, show broad featureless absorption in the region of wavelengths corresponding to spectral lines of sodium, potassium and water. We develop a detailed atomistic model, describing interactions of atomic or molecular radiators with dust and atmospheric haze particulates. This model incorporates a realistic structure of haze particulates from small nano-size seed particles up to sub-micron irregularly shaped aggregates, accounting for both pairwise collisions between the radiator and haze perturbers, and quasi-static mean field shift of levels in haze environments. This formalism can explain large flattening of absorption and emission spectra in haze atmospheres and shows how the radiator - haze particle interaction affects the absorption spectral shape in the wings of spectral lines and near their centers. The theory can account for nearly all realistic structure, size and chemical composition of haze particulates and predict their influence on absorption and emission spectra in hazy environments. We illustrate the utility of the method by computing shift and broadening of the emission spectra of the sodium D line in an argon haze. The simplicity, elegance and generality of the proposed model should make it amenable to a broad community of users in astrophysics and chemistry.
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