Seismology and modelization of early-type stars with moderate rotation

Author(s)

Laerte Brandão Paes de Andrade

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Instituto Astronômico e Geofísico (IAG/SBD)
• Defense date: 2010-07-07

Examining board members

Eduardo Janot Pacheco; Roberto Dell' Aglio Dias da Costa; Jose Renan de Medeiros; Kepler de Souza Oliveira Filho; Juan Carlos Suárez Yanes

• Advisor: Eduardo Janot Pacheco

Abstract

Current computational models for hot stars with moderate or rapid rotation (vrot >= 20 km/s) do not satisfactorily reproduce the characteristics of observed frequencies due to non-radial pulsations, for instance, splittings and asymmetries. The goal of this work is to improve the quality of such models in such a way that they better represent observational characteristics of non-radial pulsations, in an iterative process which leads to better precision of physical parameters and internal structure of such stars. In particular, we determine the radial rotation profile in the interior of the objects. Present-day satellites (Corot, Kepler, etc.) allow measurement of non-radial pulsation parameters with great detection sensibility and high-resolution frequency power. We present the results of our calculations, compared with results obtained from photometric and spectroscopic observations from the beta Cephei star theta Ophiuchi (vsini = 29 +/- 7 km/s). With such a procedure, we were able to: (i) identify the characteristics of internal rotation profiles of hot stars, which are needed for more realistic models; and (ii) simplify the problem: we redid the perturbative calculation code including only the main terms in relation to the sensibility to rotation, yielding a more precise and efficient calculus of non-radial pulsation for the stars studied. (AU)