Does turbulence change nuclear burning in stars?

I sometimes have research ideas that I think are cool, but that don’t make sense for me to pursue. I generally just make a note of them and move on. This is the eleventh post in a series describing some of the ideas I’ve accumulated.

Does turbulence change nuclear burning in stars?

What’s the idea?

Nuclear burning rates are exponentially sensitive to temperature. Stellar models calculate the mean temperature at each point in a star, but there can be fluctuations about this mean due to turbulent motions. This effect has been studied theoretically, but has never been applied to stellar evolution so far as I know.

The idea would be to implement a prescription in stellar evolution software instruments that corrects nuclear burning rates to account for local turbulence.

Why is this interesting?

Temperature fluctuations scale with the Mach number of turbulence, and the highest Mach-number turbulent burning zones in stars happen late in the lives of massive stars, in the run-up to a core collapse supernova. It is conceivable that large changes in these burning rates could alter the properties of the explosion or related observations like the neutrino luminosity.

How can I get started?

I would take the theoretical model linked above and implement it in MESA. Because the change to the burning rate is dependent on the reaction’s temperature dependence this could involve a fair amount of code to be fully general. Instead of starting there, I would start with particular massive star models of interest, and only implement this effect for the most relevant reactions. I would then run some massive star models through core collapse both accounting for this effect and not and look for differences.