On solar models and their periods of oscillation

Abstract

A program is presented for the calculation of solar evolution sequences, and an analysis is presented of the numerical accuracy of the computed models. Effects of changing the opacity interpolation or opacity tables are investigated, and selected periods of adiabatic oscillations for the models are calculated with an estimation of the errors in the periods. For the modes corresponding to the observed whole disk 5-min oscillations, the relative error in the computed periods is found to be about 0.0017, which is significantly smaller than the difference in periods between models computed with Cox and Tabor (1976) and Carson (1976) opacities. Results show that the observational and computational accuracy is such that the observed periods put fairly stringent constraints on the interior structure of solar models.