Monday, July 1 - Session 1 - 11:20

Present observational status of high mass pulsating stars

P. De Cat
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Instituut voor Sterrenkunde, Celestijnenlaan 200B, B-3001 Leuven, Belgium

 

Stellar pulsation is common across the HR diagram. Thanks to the successful application of asteroseismic methods first to the Sun and later on to White Dwarfs, the study of pulsating stars has gained a lot of interest in the last decades. In this short review, we will discuss the asteroseismic potential of high mass pulsating stars.
In the upper part of the main sequence, at least two classes of pulsating stars are found. The Cephei stars (Ceps) are early-B type p-mode pulsators with pulsation periods ranging from 3 hrs to 6 hrs. The spectroscopic and photometric variability of their prototype Cephei (HD 205021) was already noticed at the beginning of last century (Frost, E.B., 1902, ApJ 15, 340). The Slowly Pulsating B stars (SPBs) are mid-B type g-mode pulsators with periods of the order of days. It was Waelkens (1991, A&A 246, 453) who first detected the photometric variations of the seven prototypes a decade ago. Like all the other confirmed (bright) SPBs, they turn out to be line-profile variables too (Aerts et al., 1999, A&A 343, 872; Mathias et al., 2001, A&A 380, 177).
A successful application of asteroseismic techniques requires the ability to detect and to identify as much as possible simultaneously excited pulsation modes in the considered star. Therefore, high quality data with a long time-base is needed. The detection of frequency multiplets is not only crucial from an asteroseismic point of view, but it is also very helpful in the identification of the pulsation modes. In this short review, we will concentrate on recent results obtained for some representative Ceps and SPBs. Cephei, 12 Lac (HD 214993) and 16 Lac (HD 216916) are three Ceps for which several frequencies are found. o Vel (HD 74195), V335 Vel (HD 85953) and V869 Cen (HD 123515) are three multiperiodic SPBs for which hints of frequency multiplets are found. The importance of (future) line profile variation studies becomes clear since they generally reveal more pulsation frequencies compared to photometric studies. Although we are all looking forward to the data that will be gathered by future space missions like MOST, COROT and MONS, we must not forget the asteroseismic power of long-term ground-based campaigns, particularly spectroscopic ones, which are vital for accurate mode identification.
We will present the current status of seismic investigations based on (our) data in the talk.

 
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