Pulsating White dwarfs: The poster child and the little devil
Agnes Kim
Penn State Worthington Scranton
98% of all stars, including our Sun 5.5 billion years from now, have ended or will end their lives as white dwarfs. Some white dwarfs pulsate and
give us the opportunity to study their interiors through asteroseismology. In this talk, I report on the study of two of these stars. One for which
we have a very nice pulsation spectrum built on almost two years of space acquired data (by the Kepler I mission) and another also observed by
Kepler, but not nearly as well behaved. The first star allows us to place tight constraints on its internal makeup and provides results that can be
placed in the context of stellar evolution. The second one tests the limits of the methods traditionally used in white dwarf asteroseismology
and forces us to rethink these methods.
Date: | Jeudi, le 25 septembre 2014 |
Heure: | 11:30 |
Lieu: | Université de Montréal |
| Pavillon Roger-Gaudry, local D-460 |
Contact: | Pierre Bergeron |
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