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Register a new userFast core rotation in red-giant stars revealed by gravity-dominated mixed modes
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When the core hydrogen is exhausted during stellar evolution, the central region of a star contracts and the outer envelope expands and cools, giving rise to a red giant, in which convection occupies a large fraction of the star. Conservation of angular momentum requires that the cores of these stars rotate faster than their envelopes, and indirect evidence supports this. Information about the angular momentum distribution is inaccessible to direct observations, but it can be extracted from the effect of rotation on oscillation modes that probe the stellar interior. Here, we report the detection of non-rigid rotation in the interiors of red-giant stars by exploiting the rotational frequency splitting of recently detected mixed modes. We demonstrate an increasing rotation rate from the surface of the star to the stellar core. Comparing with theoretical stellar models, we conclude that the core must rotate at least ten times faster than the surface. This observational result confirms the theoretical prediction of a steep gradient in the rotation profile towards the deep stellar interior.
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The space missions CoRoT and Kepler provide high quality data that allow us to test the transport of angular momentum in stars by the seismic determination of the internal rotation profile. Our aim is to test the validity of the seismic diagnostics for red giants rotation that are based on a perturbative method and to investigate the oscillation spectra when the validity does not hold. We use a non-perturbative approach implemented in the ACOR code (Ouazzani et al. 2012) that accounts for the effect of rotation on pulsations, and solves the pulsation eigenproblem directly for dipolar oscillation modes. We find that the limit of the perturbation to first order can be expressed in terms of the rotational splitting compared to the frequency separation between consecutive dipolar modes. Above this limit, non-perturbative computations are necessary but only one term in the spectral expansion of modes is sufficient as long as the core rotation rate remains significantly smaller than the pulsation frequencies. Each family of modes with different azimuthal symmetry, m, has to be considered separately. In particular, in case of rapid core rotation, the density of the spectrum differs significantly from one m-family of modes to another, so that the differences between the period spacings associated with each m-family can constitute a promising guideline toward a proper seismic diagnostic for rotation.
Observations of pressure-gravity mixed modes, combined with a theoretical framework for understanding mode formation, can yield a wealth of information about deep stellar interiors. In this paper, we seek to develop a formalism for treating the effects of deeply buried core magnetic fields on mixed modes in evolved stars, where the fields are moderate, i.e. not strong enough to disrupt wave propagation, but where they may be too strong for non-degenerate first-order perturbation theory to be applied. The magnetic field is incorporated in a way that avoids having to use this. Inclusion of the Lorentz force term is shown to yield a system of differential equations that allows for the magnetically-affected eigenfunctions to be computed from scratch, rather than following the approach of first-order perturbation theory. For sufficiently weak fields, coupling between different spherical harmonics can be neglected, allowing for reduction to a second-order system of ordinary differential equations akin to the usual oscillation equations that can be solved analogously. We derive expressions for (i) the mixed-mode quantisation condition in the presence of a field and (ii) the frequency shift associated with the magnetic field. In addition, for modes of low degree we uncover an extra offset term in the quantisation condition that is sensitive to properties of the evanescent zone. These expressions may be inverted to extract information about the stellar structure and magnetic field from observational data.
We report for the first time a parametric fit to the pattern of the ell = 1 mixed modes in red giants, which is a powerful tool to identify gravity-dominated mixed modes. With these modes, which share the characteristics of pressure and gravity modes, we are able to probe directly the helium core and the surrounding shell where hydrogen is burning. We propose two ways for describing the so-called mode bumping that affects the frequencies of the mixed modes. Firstly, a phenomenological approach is used to describe the main features of the mode bumping. Alternatively, a quasi-asymptotic mixed-mode relation provides a powerful link between seismic observations and the stellar interior structure. We used period echelle diagrams to emphasize the detection of the gravity-dominated mixed modes. The asymptotic relation for mixed modes is confirmed. It allows us to measure the gravity-mode period spacings in more than two hundred red giant stars. The identification of the gravity-dominated mixed modes allows us to complete the identification of all major peaks in a red giant oscillation spectrum, with significant consequences for the true identification of ell = 3 modes, of ell = 2 mixed modes, for the mode widths and amplitudes, and for the ell = 1 rotational splittings. The accurate measurement of the gravity-mode period spacing provides an effective probe of the inner, g-mode cavity. The derived value of the coupling coefficient between the cavities is different for red giant branch and clump stars. This provides a probe of the hydrogen-shell burning region that surrounds the helium core. Core contraction as red giants ascend the red giant branch can be explored using the variation of the gravity-mode spacing as a function of the mean large separation.
CoRoT and Kepler observations of red giant stars revealed very rich spectra of non-radial solar-like oscillations. Of particular interest was the detection of mixed modes that exhibit significant amplitude, both in the core and at the surface of the stars. It opens the possibility of probing the internal structure from their inner-most layers up to their surface along their evolution on the red giant branch as well as on the red-clump. Our objective is primarily to provide physical insight into the physical mechanism responsible for mixed-modes amplitudes and lifetimes. Subsequently, we aim at understanding the evolution and structure of red giants spectra along with their evolution. The study of energetic aspects of these oscillations is also of great importance to predict the mode parameters in the power spectrum. Non-adiabatic computations, including a time-dependent treatment of convection, are performed and provide the lifetimes of radial and non-radial mixed modes. We then combine these mode lifetimes and inertias with a stochastic excitation model that gives us their heights in the power spectra. For stars representative of CoRoT and Kepler observations, we show under which circumstances mixed modes have heights comparable to radial ones. We stress the importance of the radiative damping in the determination of the height of mixed modes. Finally, we derive an estimate for the height ratio between a g-type and a p-type mode. This can thus be used as a first estimate of the detectability of mixed-modes.
The detection of mixed modes in subgiants and red giants by the CoRoT and emph{Kepler} space-borne missions allows us to investigate the internal structure of evolved low-mass stars. In particular, the measurement of the mean core rotation rate as a function of the evolution places stringent constraints on the physical mechanisms responsible for the angular momentum redistribution in stars. It showed that the current stellar evolution codes including the modelling of rotation fail to reproduce the observations. An additional physical process that efficiently extracts angular momentum from the core is thus necessary. Our aim is to assess the ability of mixed modes to do this. To this end, we developed a formalism that provides a modelling of the wave fluxes in both the mean angular momentum and the mean energy equations in a companion paper. In this article, mode amplitudes are modelled based on recent asteroseismic observations, and a quantitative estimate of the angular momentum transfer is obtained. This is performed for a benchmark model of 1.3 $M_{odot}$ at three evolutionary stages, representative of the evolved pulsating stars observed by CoRoT and Kepler. We show that mixed modes extract angular momentum from the innermost regions of subgiants and red giants. However, this transport of angular momentum from the core is unlikely to counterbalance the effect of the core contraction in subgiants and early red giants. In contrast, for more evolved red giants, mixed modes are found efficient enough to balance and exceed the effect of the core contraction, in particular in the hydrogen-burning shell. Our results thus indicate that mixed modes are a promising candidate to explain the observed spin-down of the core of evolved red giants, but that an other mechanism is to be invoked for subgiants and early red giants.
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