Nami Mowlavi

Astrophysicist
University of Geneva, Switzerland

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Main-sequence pulsators

On the main sequence, pulsating stars form an almost continuous sequence in brightness, except for a magnitude range between Scuti and slowly pulsating B stars.
Against all expectations, we discovered 36 periodic variables in this luminosity range in the open cluster NGC 3766 (Mowlavi et al. 2013), the origins of which was a mystery. Their periods, shown in Figure 1, are approximately between 2 hours and half a day. These are smaller than the periods expected for the brighter SPB stars, and longer than the ones expected for the fainter delta Scuti stars. Furthermore, their variability amplitudes are at the milli-magnitude level, which could explain why they have hitherto escaped easy detection. Our discovery was done using the Swiss 1.2 meter Euler telescope at La Silla, Chile.

Figure 1. Periods of the periodic variables (other than purely eclipsing binaries) as a function of their V' magnitude. Multiple periods of the same object are connected with solid lines. The color of each marker indicates the group to which the star belongs: red for SPB variables, green and cyan for new class variables, blue for delta Sct variables, magenta for gamma Dor variables, and black for either red giants or periodic variables fainter than V' = 15.5 mag, unless clearly belonging to one of the above-mentioned groups. Adapted from Figure 10 of Mowlavi et al. (2013).

N. Mowlavi, F. Barblan, S. Saesen, L. Eyer (2013)

Astronomy & Astrophysics 554, A108

fig3766_VClass

https://obswww.unige.ch/~mowlavi


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