Stellar seismology appears more and more as a powerful tool for a better determination of the fundamental properties of solar-type stars. However the particular case of Sun is still challenging. The helioseismic sound speed determination continues to disagree with the Standard Solar Model (SSM) prediction for about a decade, questioning the reliability of this model. One of the sources of uncertainty could be in the treatment of the transport of radiation from the solar core to the surface. In this letter, we use the new OPAS opacity tables, recently available for solar modelling, to address this issue. We discuss first the peculiarities of these tables, then we quantify their impact on the solar sound speed and density profiles using the reduced OPAS tables taken on the grids of the OPAL ones. We use the two evolution codes MESA and CLES that led to similar conclusions in the solar radiative zone. In comparison to commonly used OPAL opacity tables, the new solar models computed, for the most recent photospheric composition, with OPAS tables present improvements in the location of the base of the convective zone and in the description of the solar radiative zone in comparison to the helioseismic observations, even if the differences in the Rosseland mean opacity do not exceed 6%. We finally carry out a comparison to a solar model computed with the OP opacity tables.
Seismic observations have led to doubts or ambiguities concerning the opacity calculations used in stellar physics. Here, we concentrate on the iron-group opacity peak, due to iron, nickel, and chromium, located around T = 200,000 K for densities from
, which creates some convective layers in stellar radiative envelopes for masses between 3 and 18
. These conditions were extensively studied in the 1980s. More recently, inconsistencies between OP and OPAL opacity calculations have complicated the interpretation of seismic observations as the iron-group opacity peak excites acoustic and gravity modes in SPB, β Cephei, and sdB stars. We investigate the reliability of the theoretical opacity calculations using the modern opacity codes ATOMIC and SCO-RCG. We show their temperature and density dependence for conditions that are achievable in the laboratory and equivalent to astrophysical conditions. We also compare new theoretical opacity spectra with OP spectra and quantify how different approximations impact the Rosseland mean calculations.This detailed study estimates new ATOMIC and SCO-RCG Rosseland mean values for astrophysical conditions which we compare to OP values. Some puzzling questions are still under investigation for iron, but we find a strong increase in the Rosseland mean nickel opacity of a factor between 2 and 6 compared to OP. This appears to be due to the use of extrapolated atomic data for the Ni opacity within the OP calculations. A study on chromium is also shown.
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