On the Red Giant Branch: Ambiguity in the Surface Boundary Condition Leads to ~100 K Uncertainty in Model Effective Temperatures

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that the treatment of the surface boundary condition in stellar models causes approximately 100 K uncertainty in the effective temperature predictions along the red giant branch, affecting model reliability.

Contribution

The paper reveals how different surface boundary conditions in stellar models lead to significant temperature offsets, highlighting a key source of uncertainty in RGB stellar modeling.

Findings

Surface boundary condition choice causes ±100 K Teff offsets.

Teff predictions are sensitive to optical depth at boundary application.

Systematic uncertainties limit model fidelity assessments.

Abstract

The effective temperature (Teff) distribution of stellar evolution models along the red giant branch (RGB) is sensitive to a number of parameters including the overall metallicity, elemental abundance patterns, the efficiency of convection, and the treatment of the surface boundary condition. Recently there has been interest in using observational estimates of the RGB Teff to place constraints on the mixing length parameter, a_MLT, and possible variation with metallicity. Here we use 1D MESA stellar evolution models to explore the sensitivity of the RGB Teff to the treatment of the surface boundary condition. We find that different surface boundary conditions can lead to +/- 100 K metallicity-dependent offsets on the RGB relative to one another in spite of the fact that all models can reproduce the properties of the Sun. Moreover, for a given atmosphere T-tau relation, we find that the RGB Teff is also sensitive to the optical depth at which the surface boundary condition is applied in the stellar model. Nearly all models adopt the photosphere as the location of the surface boundary condition but this choice is somewhat arbitrary. We compare our models to stellar parameters derived from the APOGEE-Kepler sample of first ascent red giants and find that systematic uncertainties in the models due to treatment of the surface boundary condition place a limit of ~100 K below which it is not possible to make firm conclusions regarding the fidelity of the current generation of stellar models.