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Towards Ensemble Asteroseismology of the Pulsating DB White Dwarf Stars

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2016

G. Handler ,
M.A. Wood ,
A. Nitta  and
the Whole Earth Telescope Network of Collaborators
G. Handler
Affiliation:
South African Astronomical Observatory, P.O. Box 9, Observatory 7935, South Africa
M.A. Wood
Affiliation:
Department of Physics and Space Sciences and SARA Observatory, Florida Institute of Technology, 150 W. Univ. Blvd., Melbourne, FL 32901, USA
A. Nitta
Affiliation:
Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Apache Point Observatory, P.O. Box 59, Sunspot, NM 88349, USA

Extract

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The origin of the helium-atmosphere DB white dwarfs is still a matter of debate. In particular, the question is unresolved whether binary evolution produces a significant number of DBs. The pulsating DB white dwarfs (DBV stars) offer a complementary insight into this problem through asteroseismology; DBs descending from binaries will have different interior structures than DBs originating from single stars (Nitta & Winget, 1998).

GD 358 is by far the best-observed pulsating DBV star, and the only one for which asteroseismology has been performed to date. This star’s structure has been shown to be inconsistent with an origin from binary evolution (Nitta & Winget, 1998), but most of the other DBVs are relatively poorly studied.

We therefore analysed archival data on all DBVs and obtained new measurements of stars with very little data available (Table 1), firstly to identify suitable targets for asteroseismological investigations and secondly to examine the pulsation spectra of the DBVs as a group, following the works of Clemens (1994) and Kleinman (1995) on the pulsating DA white dwarfs. Our study also produced new seismological results on individual stars and promising targets for future Whole Earth Telescope (WET, Nather et al., 1990) runs.

Type
Part 6. Asteroseismology from Space and from the Ground
Information
International Astronomical Union Colloquium , Volume 185: Radial and Nonradial Pulsations as Probes of Stellar Physics , 2002 , pp. 608 - 609
Copyright
Copyright © Astronomical Society of the Pacific 2002

References

Clemens, J.C. 1994, PhD Thesis, University of Texas, USGoogle Scholar
Handler, G. 2000, MNRAS, 323, L43 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kleinman, S.J. 1995, PhD Thesis, University of Texas, US Google Scholar
Nather, R.E., Winget, D.E., Clemens, J.C., Hansen, C.J., & Hine, B.P. 1990, ApJ, 361, 309 Google Scholar
Nitta, A. & Winget, D.E. 1998, Baltic Astronomy, 7, 141 Google Scholar