Combining BRITE and ground-based photometry for the beta Cephei star nu Eridani

Author(s)
G Handler, M. Rybicka, A. Popowicz, Rainer Kuschnig, Werner Wolfgang Weiss
Abstract

We report a simultaneous ground- and space-based photometric study of the β Cephei star ν Eridani. Half a year of observations have been obtained by four of the five satellites constituting BRITE-Constellation, supplemented with ground-based photoelectric photometry. We show that carefully combining the two data sets virtually eliminates the aliasing problem that often hampers time series analyses. We detect 40 periodic signals intrinsic to the star in the light curves. Despite a lower detection limit, we do not recover all the pressure and mixed modes previously reported in the literature, but we newly detect six additional gravity modes. This behaviour is a consequence of temporal changes in the pulsation amplitudes that we also detected for some of the p modes. We point out that the dependence of theoretically predicted pulsation amplitude on wavelength is steeper in visual passbands than those observationally measured, to the extent that three dominant pulsation modes of ν Eridani would be incorrectly identified using data in optical filters only. We discuss possible reasons for this discrepancy.

Organisation(s)
Department of Astrophysics
External organisation(s)
Polish Academy of Sciences (PAS), Silesian University of Technology
Journal
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Volume
464
Pages
2249 - 2258
No. of pages
10
ISSN
0035-8711
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stw2518
Publication date
01-2017
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
103003 Astronomy, 103004 Astrophysics
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Astronomy and Astrophysics, Space and Planetary Science
Portal url
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/1c64567d-34d1-4c40-bdc7-54ffd542430e