Viewing the interiors of O- & B-type stars through the lens of asteroseismology - May Gade Pedersen

Soft focus - Doh!, sorry :-(
May Gade Pedersen, University of Sydney
The chemical evolution of the Universe is largely guided by the lives of O- and B-type stars. These stars are born with a convective core on the main-sequence and are heavily influenced by additional mixing occurring at both the convective core boundary and in the radiative envelope. Such mixing transports additional hydrogen fuel from the envelope to the convective core, allowing the stars to live longer and to enhance their final helium core mass at the end of the main-sequence evolution. Consequently, chemical mixing has a high impact on the stellar evolution of both intermediate- and high-mass stars yet remains one of the dominant uncertainties in their stellar structure and evolution theory, along with their interior angular momentum transport. Asteroseismology is a powerful tool for studying stellar interiors through the detection and interpretation of stellar oscillations. With this talk I will demonstrate how we can use such stellar oscillations to probe internal mixing and rotation, as well as discuss recent results for O- and B-type stars observed by photometric space telescopes such as Kepler and TESS.