Chroma+GAS: An Expedited Solution for the Chemical Equilibrium for Cool Stellar Atmospheres

Abstract

We describe a unique approach to economizing the solution to the general chemical equilibrium and equation-of-state problem for late-type stars, including diatomic and polyatomic molecules, that is fast, accurate, and suitable for responsive approximate data modelling applications, and to more intensive modelling approaches in which the calculation of the gas equilibrium must be expedited to allow other aspects to be treated more realistically. The method, based on a novel economization of the Newton's method of solution of the linearized Saha and conservation equations, has been implemented in Python and made available as a stand-alone package, GASPy, and has been integrated into the interactive Python atmosphere and spectrum modelling code ChromaStarPy. As a result, ChromaStarPy now computes the state of the gas, the number density of absorbers, and the surface flux spectrum, with consistent inclusion of 105 chemical species, including 34 diatomic, and 16 polyatomic, neutral molecules, as well as H$^-$ and H$_2^+$, as well as many neutral and ionized atomic species. The economized method converges very rapidly and greatly improves the code's relevance to late-type stellar and brown dwarf spectrum modelling. We provide a brief overview of the GAS methodology, and present some illustrative results for the chemical equilibrium and spectrum for an M-type bright giant and dwarf, and a comparison to results of the PHOENIX/PPRESS package. All codes are available from the OpenStars www site: www.ap.smu.ca/OpenStars.