Solar p-mode damping rates: Insight from a 3D hydrodynamical simulation

Abstract

Space-borne missions such as CoRoT and Kepler have provided a rich harvest of high-quality photometric data for solar-like pulsators. It is now possible to measure damping rates for hundreds of main-sequence and thousands of red-giant stars with an unprecedented precision. However, among the seismic parameters, mode damping rates remain poorly understood and thus barely used for inferring the physical properties of stars. Previous approaches to model mode damping rates were based on mixing-length theory or a Reynoldsstress approach to model turbulent convection. While they can be used to grasp the main physics of the problem, such approaches are of little help to provide quantitative estimates as well as a definitive answer on the relative contribution of each physical mechanism. Indeed, due to the high complexity of the turbulent flow and its interplay with the oscillations, those theories rely on many free parameters which inhibits an in-depth understanding of the problem. Our aim is thus to assess the ability of 3D hydrodynamical simulations to infer the physical mechanisms responsible for damping of solar-like oscillations. To this end, a solar high-spatial resolution and long-duration hydrodynamical 3D simulation computed with the ANTARES code allows probing the coupling between turbulent convection and the normal modes of the simulated box. Indeed, normal modes of the simulation experience realistic driving and damping in the super-adiabatic layers of the simulation. Therefore, investigating the properties of the normal modes in the simulation provides a unique insight into the mode physics. We demonstrate that such an approach provides constraints on the solar damping rates and is able to disentangle the relative contribution related to the perturbation (by the oscillation) of the turbulent pressure, the gas pressure, the radiative flux, and the convective flux contributions. Finally, we conclude that using the normal modes of a 3D numerical simulation is possible and is potentially able to unveil the respective role of the different physical mechanisms responsible for mode damping provided the time-duration of the simulation is long enough.