ANTARES -- A Numerical Tool for Astrophysical RESearch -- With applications to solar granulation

TL;DR

ANTARES is a versatile numerical code designed for stellar hydrodynamics simulations, successfully applied to high-resolution solar granulation modeling, revealing small-scale vortex dynamics and turbulent flows.

Contribution

This paper introduces the ANTARES code and demonstrates its application to detailed solar granulation simulations with high resolution and grid refinement techniques.

Findings

Identification of small-scale vortex tubes (~100 km) in solar granulation

Observation of vortex tubes entering the photosphere arclike from below

Contribution of vortex tubes to turbulent velocity fields near granule boundaries

Abstract

We discuss the general design of the ANTARES code which is intended for simulations in stellar hydrodynamics with radiative transfer and realistic microphysics in 1D, 2D and 3D. We then compare the quality of various numerical methods. We have applied ANTARES in order to obtain high resolution simulations of solar granulation which we describe and analyze. In order to obtain high resolution, we apply grid refinement to a region predominantly occupied by an exploding granule. Strong, rapidly rotating vortex tubes of small diameter (~100 km) generated by the downdrafts and ascending into the photosphere near the granule boundaries evolve, often entering the photosphere from below in an arclike fashion. They essentially contribute to the turbulent velocity field near the granule boundaries.