On carbon monoxide cooling in the solar atmosphere

The CO cooling rate for models of the solar atmosphere using the detailed line-by-line CO opacity in the fundamental band, and carrying out a full radiative transfer calculation for each line is computed. The importance of the different assumptions that have been made to obtain the CO cooling rate and find that when detailed optical depth effects are taken into account, the calculated CO cooling rate at line optical depths near unity can be smaller than optically thin estimates by more than an order of magnitude is studied. It is found that CO cooling does not account for the missing source of radiative cooling in the temperature minimum region of the quiet sun.