Observatoire de Paris Institut national de recherche scientifique français Univerité Pierre et Marie Curie Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7

Constraining early stellar evolution with asteroseismology

mardi 28 février 2017, par Konstanze Zwintz (Institute for Astro- and Particle Physics, University of Innsbruck)

Mardi 14 mars 2017 à 11h00 , Lieu : Salle de confĂ©rence du bâtiment 17

The earliest phases in the lives of stars define their complete evolutionary paths until their deaths. Therefore, understanding the physical processes that occur in these early stages is essential. But although we have a general concept of how stars are formed and evolve, our current knowledge of early stellar evolution is limited. Pre-main sequence stars can become vibrationally unstable during their evolution to the zero-age main sequence. As they gain their energy from gravitational contraction and have not started nuclear fusion in their cores yet, their inner structures are significantly different to those of (post-) main sequence stars. Asteroseismology has been proven to be a successful tool to unravel details of the internal structure for different types of stars in various stages of evolution well after birth. We can now show that it has similar power for pre-main sequence objects.