Pulsation in faint blue stars

TL;DR

This paper models low-mass pre-white dwarf stars to understand their pulsation mechanisms, confirming that iron-group element opacity drives pulsations across a broad temperature and gravity range, aligning with recent observations.

Contribution

It introduces detailed stellar models including atomic diffusion and radiative levitation, expanding understanding of pulsation instability regions in pre-white dwarf stars.

Findings

Large instability region from 30,000 K to 50,000 K

Pulsations driven by iron-group element opacity

Models match observed pulsator properties

Abstract

Following the discovery of blue large-amplitude pulsators (BLAPs) by the OGLE survey, additional hot, high-amplitude pulsating stars have been discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility. It has been proposed that all of these objects are low-mass pre-white dwarfs and that their pulsations are driven by the opacity of iron-group elements. With this expanded population of pulsating objects, it was decided to compute a sequence of post-common-envelope stellar models using the MESA stellar evolution code and to examine the pulsation properties of low-mass pre-white dwarfs using non-adiabatic analysis with the GYRE stellar oscillation code. By including the effects of atomic diffusion and radiative levitation, it is shown that a large region of instability exists from effective temperatures of 30,000 K up to temperatures of at least 50,000 K and at a wide range of surface gravities. This encompasses both groups of pulsator observed so far, and confirms that the driving mechanism is through iron group element opacity. We make some conservative estimates about the range of periods, masses, temperatures and gravities in which further such pulsators might be observed.