Magnetism in Massive Stars

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in understanding the magnetic and dynamic phenomena in massive stars, emphasizing observational techniques and their implications for stellar evolution.

Contribution

It synthesizes recent observational findings on magnetic fields, rotation, and tides in massive stars, highlighting their impact on stellar evolution and remaining mysteries.

Findings

Space-based photometry reveals interior dynamics of massive stars.

Spectropolarimetry detects surface magnetic fields in massive stars.

Dynamics like rotation and tides significantly influence stellar evolution.

Abstract

Massive stars are the drivers of star formation and galactic dynamics due to their relatively short lives and explosive demises, thus impacting all of astrophysics. Since they are so impactful on their environments, through their winds on the main sequence and their ultimate supernovae, it is crucial to understand how they evolve. Recent photometric observations with space-based platforms such as CoRoT, K2, and now TESS have permitted access to their interior dynamics through asteroseismology, while ground-based spectropolarimetric measurements such as those of ESPaDOnS have given us a glimpse at their surface magnetic fields. The dynamics of massive stars involve a vast range of scales. Extant methods can either capture the long-term structural evolution or the short-term dynamics such as convection, magnetic dynamos, and waves due to computational costs. Thus, many mysteries remain regarding the impact of such dynamics on stellar evolution, but they can have strong implications both for how they evolve and what they leave behind when they die. Some of these dynamics including rotation, tides, and magnetic fields have been addressed in recent work, which is reviewed in this paper.