The CoRoT Be group

Summary

Be stars are main-sequence or slighly evolved, rapidly rotating stars, surrounded by an equatorially concentrated envelope (disk) fed by discrete mass-loss events caused by yet unknown mechanisms. In the H-R diagram, early Be stars are located at the lower border of the instability domain of the beta Cephei stars, while mid and late Be stars are mixed with SPB stars. Short periods have been commonly detected in light curves and spectral line profile variations and attributed to pulsatiosn and rotational modulation. A combination of high rotation and beating of pulsation modes having closely spaced frequencies are considered as a possible explanation for discontinuous mass-loss events.

CoRoT offers the opportunity to detect new pulsation periods, especially beating periods, to detect or confirm multiperiods, to disentagle stable periods due to pulsations from transient periods due to rotational modulation of temporary, possibly magnetic, corotating structures, and to better understand how the disk is generated.

Targets

Be stars are secondary bright targets candidates of the core seismology program of CoRoT as well as faint targets of the Additional Program. Complementary ground-based observations of these targets are also being obtained. Seismic modelling is ongoing.

Collaboration

The CoRoT Be stars group is composed of members from several institutes of France, Spain, Brazil and Belgium. Papers already published by this group are available on this website.

Ground-based observations are obtained in collaboration with other CoRoT groups and Chilean researchers.

Seismic modelling is performed in collaboration with Japanese researchers and the SIROCO project.

For more information, please contact Coralie Neiner

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