Solar abundances and 3D model atmospheres

TL;DR

This paper derives solar elemental abundances using advanced 3D hydrodynamical models and compares them to traditional methods, highlighting improvements in modeling the solar atmosphere and resolving discrepancies, especially for oxygen.

Contribution

It demonstrates that 3D hydrodynamical models better represent the solar photosphere's thermal structure and improves abundance determinations over 1D models.

Findings

3D models match observed solar continuum intensity variations.

Oxygen abundance discrepancies are addressed.

Lower photosphere structure is well represented by 3D models.

Abstract

We present solar photospheric abundances for 12 elements from optical and near-infrared spectroscopy. The abundance analysis was conducted employing 3D hydrodynamical (CO5BOLD) as well as standard 1D hydrostatic model atmospheres. We compare our results to others with emphasis on discrepancies and still lingering problems, in particular exemplified by the pivotal abundance of oxygen. We argue that the thermal structure of the lower solar photosphere is very well represented by our 3D model. We obtain an excellent match of the observed center-to-limb variation of the line-blanketed continuum intensity, also at wavelengths shortward of the Balmer jump.