Pulsating massive stars as finely tuned instruments in the stellar symphony featuring Dominic Bowman (Newcastle University, UK)

Hosted by: Erin Higgins (Queens University Belfast)

Abstract: Massive stars are important metal factories in the Universe because through their winds and explosive deaths as supernovae they provide radiative, kinematic, and chemical feedback to their surroundings. However, stellar evolution models currently contain large theoretical uncertainties for physical mechanisms at work in the deep interiors of massive stars. The uncertainties associated with rotation, chemical mixing, magnetic fields, and angular momentum transport propagate throughout stellar evolution making it difficult to accurately determine stellar masses and ages. The analysis of pulsation frequencies in massive stars allows one to break model degeneracies, uniquely probe stellar interiors, and constrain uncalibrated physical processes within our models. In this seminar, I discuss the recent advances in our understanding of massive stars by means of asteroseismology – the study of stellar pulsations. Modern space telescopes have revealed diverse variability mechanisms in massive stars across different evolutionary stages, which includes the main sequence through to blue supergiant stars. This provides us with the opportunity to perform a data-driven calibration of evolution models for some of the most massive and short-lived stars in the Universe.

Personal URL: https://dbowman234.github.io/

Project URL: https://research.ncl.ac.uk/symphony/