sdOB star Feige 46 spectrum

DOI

We present the discovery of long-period, low-amplitude, g-mode pulsations in the intermediate He-rich hot subdwarf (sdOB) star Feige 46. So far, only one other He-enriched sdOB star (LS IV -14116) was known to exhibit such pulsations. From our ground-based light curves of Feige 46, we extracted five independent periodicities ranging from 2294s to 3400s. We fit our optical spectrum of the star with our grid of non-local thermodynamic equilibrium (NLTE) model atmospheres and derived the following atmospheric parameters: Teff=36120+/-230K, logg=5.93+/-0.04, and log N(He)/N(H)=-0.32+/-0.03 (formal fitting errors only). These parameters are very similar to those of LS IV -14116 and place Feige 46 well outside of the instability strip where the hydrogen-rich g-mode sdB pulsators are found. We used the Gaia parallax and proper motion of Feige 46 to perform a kinematic analysis of this star and found that it likely belongs to the Galactic halo population. This is most certainly an intriguing and interesting result given that LS IV -14116 is also a halo object.The mechanism responsible for the pulsations in these two peculiar objects remains unclear, but a possible scenario involves the epsilon-mechanism. Although they are the only two members in their class of variable stars, these pulsators appear to have more in common than just their pulsation properties.

Associated data

Identifier
DOI http://doi.org/10.26093/cds/vizier.36239012
Source https://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/lp/custom/CDS.VizieR/J/A+A/623/L12
Related Identifier https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/A+A/623/L12
Related Identifier http://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/A+A/623/L12
Related Identifier https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/assocdata/?obs_collection=J/A+A/623/L12
Metadata Access http://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/pmh/pubreg.xml?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_b2find&identifier=ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/A+A/623/L12
Provenance
Creator Latour M.; Green E.M.; Fontaine G.
Publisher CDS
Publication Year 2019
Rights https://cds.unistra.fr/vizier-org/licences_vizier.html
OpenAccess true
Contact CDS support team <cds-question(at)unistra.fr>
Representation
Resource Type Dataset; AstroObjects
Discipline Astrophysics and Astronomy; Interdisciplinary Astronomy; Natural Sciences; Observational Astronomy; Physics; Stellar Astronomy