Modeling the near-UV band of GK stars, Paper I: LTE models

TL;DR

This paper develops LTE atmospheric models for GK stars, comparing different line lists and validating against observed spectra to improve understanding of near-UV spectral modeling.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive grid of LTE models with varied line lists and stellar parameters, assessing their accuracy against observed stellar spectra.

Findings

Models with the 'big' line list match broad-band UV flux and Teff scales.

Models with the 'small' line list show better internal consistency and match empirical Teff.

No widespread near-UV discrepancy found for Arcturus, suggesting peculiarity.

Abstract

We present a grid of LTE atmospheric models and synthetic spectra that cover the spectral class range from mid-G to mid-K, and luminosity classes from V to III, that is dense in Teff sampling (Delta Teff=62.5 K), for stars of solar metallicity and moderately metal poor scaled solar abundance ([A/H]=0.0 and -0.5). All models have been computed with two choices of atomic line list: a) the "big" line lists of Kurucz (1992) that best reproduce the broad-band solar blue and near UV flux level, and b) the "small" lists of Kurucz & Peytremann (1975) that provide the best fit to the high resolution solar blue and near-UV spectrum. We compare our model SEDs to a sample of stars carefully selected from the large catalog of uniformly re-calibrated spectrophotometry of Burnashev (1985) with the goal of determining how the quality of fit varies with stellar parameters, especially in the historically troublesome blue and near-UV bands. We confirm that our models computed with the "big" line list recover the derived Teff values of the PHOENIX NextGen grid, but find that the models computed with the "small" line list provide greater internal self-consistency among different spectral bands, and closer agreement with the empirical Teff scale of Ramirez & Melendez (2005), but not to the interferometrically derived Teff values of Baines et al. (2010). We find no evidence that the near UV band discrepancy between models and observations for Arcturus (alpha Boo) reported by Short & Hauschildt (2003 and 2009) is pervasive, and that Arcturus may be peculiar in this regard.