English

On Thermohaline Mixing in Accreting White Dwarfs

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2014-09-01 v1

Abstract

We discuss the recent claim that the thermohaline ("fingering") instability is important in accreting white dwarfs, increasing the derived accretion fluxes potentially by orders of magnitude. We present an alternative view and conclude that at least in the steady state this is not the case and the current method of estimating accretion fluxes is correct.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1408.6934,
  title  = {On Thermohaline Mixing in Accreting White Dwarfs},
  author = {Detlev Koester},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1408.6934},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

To be published in the proceedings of the European Workshop on White Dwarfs 2014 (Montreal)