Evidence for granulation in early A-type stars

TL;DR

This paper presents evidence that granulation, a surface convection phenomenon, exists in early A-type stars, challenging previous beliefs that such stars lack observable surface convection.

Contribution

It provides the first observational evidence of granulation in A2-type stars and offers an alternative explanation for numerous frequencies previously attributed to pulsation modes.

Findings

Granulation signatures are consistent with known scaling relations.

Most Fourier peaks are due to granulation noise, not pulsation modes.

The number of true pulsation modes is significantly lower than previously thought.

Abstract

Stars with spectral types earlier than about F0 on (or close) to the main sequence have long been believed to lack observable surface convection, although evolutionary models of A-type stars do predict very thin surface convective zones. We present evidence for granulation in two delta Scuti stars of spectral type A2: HD174936 and HD50844. Recent analyses of space-based CoRoT (Convection, Rotation, and planetary Transits) data revealed up to some 1000 frequencies in the photometry of these stars. The frequencies were interpreted as individual pulsation modes. If true, there must be large numbers of nonradial modes of very high degree l which should suffer cancellation effects in disk-integrated photometry (even of high space-based precision). The p-mode interpretation of all the frequencies in HD174936 and HD50844 depends on the assumption of white (frequency independent) noise. Our independent analyses of the data provide an alternative explanation: most of the peaks in the Fourier spectra are the signature of non-white granulation background noise, and less than about 100 of the frequencies are actual stellar p-modes in each star. We find granulation time scales which are consistent with scaling relations that describe cooler stars with known surface convection. If the granulation interpretation is correct, the hundreds of low-amplitude Fourier peaks reported in recent studies are falsely interpreted as independent pulsation modes and a significantly lower number of frequencies are associated with pulsation, consistent with only modes of low degree.