Magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the Tayler instability in rotating stellar interiors
Creators
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1.
Shanghai Astronomical Observatory
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2.
California Institute of Technology
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3.
Northwestern University
Abstract
The Tayler instability is an important but poorly studied magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) instability that likely operates in stellar interiors. The non-linear saturation of the Tayler instability is poorly understood and has crucial consequences for dynamo action and angular momentum transport in radiative regions of stars. We perform three-dimensional MHD simulations of the Tayler instability in a cylindrical geometry, including strong buoyancy and Coriolis forces as appropriate for its operation in realistic rotating stars. The linear growth of the instability is characterized by a pre-dominantly m = 1 oscillation with growth rates roughly following analytical expectations. The non-linear saturation of the instability appears to be caused by secondary shear instabilities and is also accompanied by a morphological change in the flow. We argue, however, that non-linear saturation likely occurs via other mechanisms in real stars where the separation of scales is larger than those reached by our simulations. We also observe dynamo action via the amplification of the axisymmetric poloidal magnetic field, suggesting that Tayler instability could be important for magnetic field generation and angular momentum transport in the radiative regions of evolving stars.
Copyright and License
Acknowledgement
The authors thank the referee Florence Marcotte for providing a constructive report which greatly improves this paper. We also thank Matteo Cantiello, Adam Jermyn, and Eliot Quataert for helpful comments and discussions. SJ is supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (grants 12133008, 12192220, and 12192223), the science research grants from the China Manned Space Project (No. CMS-CSST-2021-B02) and a Sherman Fairchild Fellowship from Caltech. JF is thankful for support through an Innovator Grant from The Rose Hills Foundation and through grant FG-2018-10515 from the Sloan Foundation. DL is supported in part by NASA HTMS grant 80NSSC20K1280. The simulations were performed on the Stampede2 under the XSEDE allocation AST200022, the High Performance Computing Resource in the Core Facility for Advanced Research Computing at Shanghai Astronomical Observatory and the Wheeler cluster at Caltech. This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. NSF PHY-1748958. We have made use of NASA’s Astrophysics Data System. Data analysis and visualization are made with Python 3, and its packages including NumPy (Van Der Walt, Colbert & Varoquaux 2011), SciPy (Oliphant 2007), Matplotlib (Hunter 2007), and the yt astrophysics analysis software suite (Turk et al. 2010).
Data Availability
The data supporting the plots within this paper are available on reasonable request to the corresponding author.
Software References
Data analysis and visualization are made with Python 3, and its packages including NumPy (Van Der Walt, Colbert & Varoquaux 2011), SciPy (Oliphant 2007), Matplotlib (Hunter 2007), and the yt astrophysics analysis software suite (Turk et al. 2010).
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Additional details
Related works
- Is new version of
- Discussion Paper: arXiv:2209.08104 (arXiv)
Funding
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- 12133008
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- 12192220
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- 12192223
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- CMS-CSST-2021-B02
- California Institute of Technology
- Sherman Fairchild Fellowship -
- Rose Hills Foundation
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- FG-2018-10515
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- 80NSSC20K1280
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-1748958
Dates
- Accepted
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2023-03-21
- Available
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2023-03-24Published
- Available
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2023-04-04Corrected and typeset