Red noise and pulsations in evolved massive stars [SSA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2101.05521


We examine high-cadence space photometry taken by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) of a sample of evolved massive stars (26 Wolf-Rayet stars and 8 Luminous Blue Variables or candidate LBVs). To avoid confusion problems, only stars without bright Gaia neighbours and without evidence of bound companions are considered. This leads to a clean sample, whose variability properties should truly reflect the properties of the WR and LBV classes. Red noise is detected in all cases and its fitting reveals characteristics very similar to those found for OB-stars. Coherent variability is also detected for 20% of the WR sample. Most detections occur at moderately high frequency (3–14/d), hence are most probably linked to pulsational activity. This work doubles the number of WRs known to exhibit high-frequency signals.

Read this paper on arXiv…

Y. Naze, G. Rauw and E. Gosset
Fri, 15 Jan 21
41/60

Comments: accepted by MNRAS – the arxiv version has some figures in low-resolution