Rosseland and Planck mean opacities for primordial matter
Abstract
We present newly calculated low-temperature opacities for gas with a primordial chemical composition. In contrast to earlier calculations which took a pure metal-free Hydrogen/Helium mixture, we take into account the small fractions of Deuterium and Lithium as resulting from Standard Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. Our opacity tables cover the density range -16 < log rho [g cm^{-3}] < -2 and temperature range of 1.8 < T [K] < 4.6, while previous tables were usually restricted to T > 10^3 K. We find that, while the presence of Deuterium does not significantly alter the opacity values, the presence of Lithium gives rise to major modifications of the opacities, at some points increasing it by approximately 2 orders of magnitude relative to pure Hydrogen/Helium opacities.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0411613,
title = {Rosseland and Planck mean opacities for primordial matter},
author = {Michael Mayer and Wolfgang J. Duschl},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0411613},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
16 pages, 8 figures, submitted to MNRAS, all figures in grey-scale and at reduced resolution, for high-res colour PDF see http://www.ita.uni-heidelberg.de/~mm/publications/MayerDuschl-2.pdf