Pure-hydrogen 3D model atmospheres of cool white dwarfs

¹ Zentrum für Astronomie der Universität Heidelberg, Landessternwarte, Königstuhl 12, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany
e-mail: ptremblay@lsw.uni-heidelberg.de; hludwig@lsw.uni-heidelberg.de
² Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam, An der Sternwarte 16, 14482 Potsdam, Germany
e-mail: msteffen@aip.de
³ Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon, UMR 5574: CNRS, Université de Lyon, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, 46 allée d’Italie, 69364 Lyon Cedex 07, France
e-mail: Bernd.Freytag@ens-lyon.fr

Received: 28 November 2012
Accepted: 7 February 2013

Abstract

A sequence of pure-hydrogen CO5BOLD 3D model atmospheres of DA white dwarfs is presented for a surface gravity of log g = 8 and effective temperatures from 6000 to 13 000 K. We show that convective properties, such as flow velocities, characteristic granulation size and intensity contrast of the granulation patterns, change significantly over this range. We demonstrate that these 3D simulations are not sensitive to numerical parameters unlike the 1D structures that considerably depend on the mixing-length parameters. We conclude that 3D spectra can be used directly in the spectroscopic analyses of DA white dwarfs. We confirm the result of an earlier preliminary study that 3D model spectra provide a much better characterization of the mass distribution of white dwarfs and that shortcomings of the 1D mixing-length theory are responsible for the spurious high-log g determinations of cool white dwarfs. In particular, the 1D theory is unable to account for the cooling effect of the convective overshoot in the upper atmospheres.