The power of heartbeats through the lens of ι Orionis

H. Pablo, N. D. Richardson, J. Fuller, A. F. J. Moffat, the BRITE Team and Photometry Tiger Team (PHOTT)

O star asteroseismology is a relatively new field which has not been able to gain significant traction due in large part to the lack of known pulsators in addition to the relatively sparse number of frequencies detected in those pulsators. This is likely due to a combination of factors, chief among them long frequencies, on the order of days, and weak amplitudes (≈1 mmag and below). Fortunately, through the discovery of the most massive heartbeat system ι Orionis and it’s corresponding tidally induced oscillations with BRITE-Constellation there exists a new avenue with which to explore O star asteroseismology. In this paper we will give a prescription for using tidally induced oscillations to do asteroseismic analysis on O stars and present a list of candidate systems for this analysis within the BRITE sample.

Proceedings of the Polish Astronomical Society, vol. 5, 167-172 (2017)

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