Surface mapping of magnetic hot stars. Theories versus observations [SSA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1711.07206


This review summarises results of recent magnetic and chemical abundance surface mapping studies of early-type stars. We discuss main trends uncovered by observational investigations and consider reliability of spectropolarimetric inversion techniques used to infer these results. A critical assessment of theoretical attempts to interpret empirical magnetic and chemical maps in the framework of, respectively, the fossil field and atomic diffusion theories is also presented. This confrontation of theory and observations demonstrates that 3D MHD models of fossil field relaxation are successful in matching the observed range of surface magnetic field geometries. At the same time, even the most recent time-dependent atomic diffusion calculations fail to reproduce diverse horizontal abundance distributions found in real magnetic hot stars.

Read this paper on arXiv…

O. Kochukhov
Tue, 21 Nov 17
28/79

Comments: 8 pages, 3 figures; review presented at the conference “Stars with a stable magnetic field: from pre-main sequence to compact remnants”; to be published by Contributions of the Astronomical Observatory Skalnat\’e Pleso