Large Eddy Simulation of Solar Photosphere Convection with Realistic Physics

TL;DR

This paper presents large eddy simulations of solar surface convection using realistic physics, revealing detailed thermal structures, convection cell sizes, and penetration depths in the solar photosphere and upper convection zone.

Contribution

It introduces a high-resolution, fully compressible radiation hydrodynamics simulation of the solar photosphere with realistic initial conditions and physics, advancing the modeling of solar convection.

Findings

Detailed thermal structure of convective motions

Range of convection cell sizes identified

Penetration depths of convection quantified

Abstract

Three-dimensional large eddy simulations of solar surface convection using realistic model physics are conducted. The thermal structure of convective motions into the upper radiative layers of the photosphere, the range of convection cell sizes, and the penetration depths of convection are investigated. A portion of the solar photosphere and the upper layers of the convection zone, a region extending 60 x 60 Mm horizontally from 0 Mm down to 20 Mm below the visible surface, is considered. We start from a realistic initial model of the Sun with an equation of state and opacities of stellar matter. The equations of fully compressible radiation hydrodynamics with dynamical viscosity and gravity are solved. We use: 1) a high order conservative TVD scheme for the hydrodynamics, 2) the diffusion approximation for the radiative transfer, 3) dynamical viscosity from subgrid scale modeling. The simulations are conducted on a uniform horizontal grid of 600 x 600, with 168 nonuniformly spaced vertical grid points, on 144 processors with distributed memory multiprocessors on supercomputer MVS-15000BM in the Computational Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences.