Thermodynamic fluctuations in solar photospheric three-dimensional convection simulations and observations

Abstract

Numerical 3D radiative (M)HD simulations of solar convection are used to understand the physical properties of the solar photosphere. To validate this approach, it is important to check that no excessive thermodynamic fluctuations arise as a consequence of the partially incomplete treatment of radiative transfer. We investigate the realism of 3D convection simulations carried out with the Stagger code. We compared the characteristic properties of several spectral lines in solar disc centre observations with spectra synthesized from the simulations. We degraded the synthetic spectra to the spatial resolution of the observations using the continuum intensity distribution. We estimated the necessary spectral degradation by comparing atlas spectra with averaged observed spectra. In addition to deriving a set of line parameters directly, we used the SIR code to invert the spectra. Most of the line parameters from the observational data are matched well by the degraded simulation spectra. The inversions predict a macroturbulent velocity below 10 m/s for the simulation at full spatial resolution, whereas they yield ~< 1000 m/s at a spatial resolution of 0.3". The temperature fluctuations in the inversion of the degraded simulation do not exceed those from the observational data (of the order of 100-200 K rms for -2<log tau<-0.5). The comparison of line parameters in spatially averaged profiles with the averaged values of line parameters in spatially resolved profiles indicates a significant change of (average) line properties at a spatial scale between 0.13" and 0.3". Up to a spatial resolution of 0.3", we find no indications of the presence of excessive thermodynamic fluctuations in the 3D HD simulation. To definitely confirm that simulations without spatial degradation contain fully realistic thermodynamic fluctuations requires observations at even better spatial resolution.

21 pages, 15 figures + 2 pages Appendix, accepted for publication in A&A; v2 version: corrected for an error in the calculation of stray-light estimates, for details see the Corrigendum to A&A, 2013, 557, 109 (DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201321596). Corrected text and numbers are in bold font. Apart from the stray-light estimates, nothing in the rest of the paper was affected by the error

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