Toward a Comprehensive Grid of Cepheid Models with MESA. IV. Modest Effects of Rotation on Blue Loops

TL;DR

This study uses MESA to model 2-8 solar mass stars with rotation, finding that rotation has minimal effects on Cepheid blue loops and cannot alone resolve the mass discrepancy problem.

Contribution

It demonstrates that rotation's impact on Cepheid evolution is modest in MESA, contrasting with results from the Geneva code's advective-diffusive scheme.

Findings

Rotation increases luminosity by less than 0.04 dex.

Rotation barely affects period-luminosity and period-radius relations.

Predicted surface rotation velocities are higher than observed.

Abstract

Evolutionary tracks for $2-8M_\odot$ stars, with metallicities of $Z=0.014$, $0.006$, and $0.002$, including rotation, are computed with Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA). We study how rotation impacts the evolutionary properties of classical Cepheids. We examine whether rotation can offer a plausible explanation for the mass discrepancy problem when it is included in the evolutionary code using the fully diffusive approximation for rotationally induced mixing processes. We find that rotation barely influences the appearance and luminosity levels of the blue loops. While luminosity increases with increasing initial rotation rate, the increase does not exceed 0.04 dex, a fraction of the increase resulting from including the main sequence (MS) core overshooting of $0.2H_p$. As a consequence, rotation alone cannot resolve the mass discrepancy problem without simultaneously requiring significant MS core overshooting. Similar to the mass-luminosity relation, the period-radius and period-luminosity relations are barely affected by rotation, while the period-age relation predicts Cepheid ages to be only a few per cent longer compared with models without rotation. The predicted surface rotational velocities are too large compared with observations. These results are in contrast with those obtained with the Geneva code, which implements rotational mixing using the advective-diffusive scheme. In that approach, the luminosity levels of the loops are significantly higher, their luminosity extent increases, and the predicted rotation velocities are lower, compared with MESA models. The differences between the two approaches arise from significantly more efficient rotation-induced mixing during the MS evolution in models computed with the advective-diffusive scheme.