Rapidly rotating red giants

Observatoire de Paris, LESIA, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Université Paris Diderot, PSL

^⋆ e-mail: charlotte.gehan@obspm.fr

Published online: 27 October 2017

Abstract

Stellar oscillations give seismic information on the internal properties of stars. Red giants are targets of interest since they present mixed modes, wich behave as pressure modes in the convective envelope and as gravity modes in the radiative core. Mixed modes thus directly probe red giant cores, and allow in particular the study of their mean core rotation.

The high–quality data obtained by CoRoT and Kepler satellites represent an unprecedented perspective to obtain thousands of measurements of red giant core rotation, in order to improve our understanding of stellar physics in deep stellar interiors.

We developed an automated method to obtain such core rotation measurements and validated it for stars on the red giant branch. In this work, we particularly focus on the specific application of this method to red giants having a rapid core rotation. They show complex spectra where it is tricky to disentangle rotational splittings from mixed-mode period spacings. We demonstrate that the method based on the identification of mode crossings is precise and efficient. The determination of the mean core rotation directly derives from the precise measurement of the asymptotic period spacing ΔΠ₁ and of the frequency at which the crossing of the rotational components is observed.