PHL 417: a zirconium-rich pulsating hot subdwarf (V366 Aquarid) discovered in K2 data

RH Østensen, CS Jeffery, H Saio… - Monthly Notices of …, 2020 - academic.oup.com
RH Østensen, CS Jeffery, H Saio, JJ Hermes, JH Telting, M Vučković, J Vos, AS Baran…
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2020academic.oup.com
The Kepler spacecraft observed the hot subdwarf star PHL 417 during its extended K2
mission, and the high-precision photometric light curve reveals the presence of 17 pulsation
modes with periods between 38 and 105 min. From follow-up ground-based spectroscopy,
we find that the object has a relatively high temperature of 35 600 K, a surface gravity of and
a supersolar helium abundance. Remarkably, it also shows strong zirconium lines
corresponding to an apparent+ 3.9 dex overabundance compared with the Sun. These …
Abstract
The Kepler spacecraft observed the hot subdwarf star PHL 417 during its extended K2 mission, and the high-precision photometric light curve reveals the presence of 17 pulsation modes with periods between 38 and 105 min. From follow-up ground-based spectroscopy, we find that the object has a relatively high temperature of 35 600 K, a surface gravity of and a supersolar helium abundance. Remarkably, it also shows strong zirconium lines corresponding to an apparent +3.9 dex overabundance compared with the Sun. These properties clearly identify this object as the third member of the rare group of pulsating heavy-metal stars, the V366-Aquarii pulsators. These stars are intriguing in that the pulsations are inconsistent with the standard models for pulsations in hot subdwarfs, which predicts that they should display short-period pulsations rather than the observed longer periods. We perform a stability analysis of the pulsation modes based on data from two campaigns with K2. The highest amplitude mode is found to be stable with a period drift, , of less than 1.1 × 10−9 s s−1. This result rules out pulsations driven during the rapid stages of helium flash ignition.
Oxford University Press