Radiative transfer with scattering for domain-decomposed 3D MHD simulations of cool stellar atmospheres

TL;DR

This paper introduces a radiative transfer solver with coherent scattering for 3D MHD simulations of stellar atmospheres, demonstrating its effects on temperature structure and fluctuations in solar-type star models.

Contribution

The implementation of a parallelized radiative transfer solver with coherent scattering in the BIFROST code for detailed stellar atmosphere simulations.

Findings

Continuum scattering has minimal impact on the Sun's photospheric temperature.

Line scattering decreases temperatures by about 350 K below log tau < -4.

Line scattering increases temperature fluctuations in the high atmosphere.

Abstract

We present the implementation of a radiative transfer solver with coherent scattering in the new BIFROST code for radiative magneto-hydrodynamical (MHD) simulations of stellar surface convection. The code is fully parallelized using MPI domain decomposition, which allows for large grid sizes and improved resolution of hydrodynamical structures. We apply the code to simulate the surface granulation in a solar-type star, ignoring magnetic fields, and investigate the importance of coherent scattering for the atmospheric structure. A scattering term is added to the radiative transfer equation, requiring an iterative computation of the radiation field. We use a short-characteristics-based Gauss-Seidel acceleration scheme to compute radiative flux divergences for the energy equation. The effects of coherent scattering are tested by comparing the temperature stratification of three 3D time-dependent hydrodynamical atmosphere models of a solar-type star: without scattering, with continuum scattering only, and with both continuum and line scattering. We show that continuum scattering does not have a significant impact on the photospheric temperature structure for a star like the Sun. Including scattering in line-blanketing, however, leads to a decrease of temperatures by about 350\,K below log tau < -4. The effect is opposite to that of 1D hydrostatic models in radiative equilibrium, where scattering reduces the cooling effect of strong LTE lines in the higher layers of the photosphere. Coherent line scattering also changes the temperature distribution in the high atmosphere, where we observe stronger fluctuations compared to a treatment of lines as true absorbers.