Highlights of Discoveries for $\delta$ Scuti Variable Stars From the Kepler Era

TL;DR

The paper reviews key discoveries about $$ Scuti variable stars from Kepler data, emphasizing progress in understanding their interior structures through asteroseismology and highlighting ongoing challenges.

Contribution

It summarizes recent advances in $$ Scuti star research enabled by Kepler data, focusing on pulsation properties and interior structure inference.

Findings

Kepler data has revealed detailed pulsation patterns in $$ Scuti stars.

Progress has been made in using pulsations to probe stellar interiors.

Many unsolved problems remain in understanding $$ Scuti variability.

Abstract

The NASA Kepler and follow-on K2 missions (2009-2018) left a legacy of data and discoveries, finding thousands of exoplanets, and also obtaining high-precision long time-series data for hundreds of thousands of stars, including many types of pulsating variables. Here we highlight a few of the ongoing discoveries from Kepler data on $\delta$ Scuti pulsating variables, which are core hydrogen-burning stars of about twice the mass of the Sun. We discuss many unsolved problems surrounding the properties of the variability in these stars, and the progress enabled by Kepler data in using pulsations to infer their interior structure, a field of research known as asteroseismology.