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| Paper: |
The Theoretical Instability Strip of V777 Her White Dwarfs |
| Volume: |
509, 20th European Workshop on White Dwarfs (EuroWD16) |
| Page: |
321 |
| Authors: |
Van Grootel, V.; Fontaine, G.; Brassard, P.; Dupret, M.-A. |
| Abstract: |
We present a new theoretical investigation of the instability strip of V777 Her (DBV) white dwarfs. We apply a time-dependent convection (TDC) treatment to cooling models of DB and DBA white dwarfs. Using the spectroscopic calibration for the convective efficiency, ML2/α=1.25, we find a wide strip covering the range of effective temperature from 30,000 K down to about 22,000 K at log g = 8.0. This accounts very well for the empirical instability strip derived from a new accurate and homogenous spectroscopic analysis of known pulsators. Our approach leads to an exact description of the blue edge and to a correct understanding of the onset and development of pulsational instabilities, similarly to our results of TDC applied to ZZ Ceti white dwarfs in the recent past. We propose that, contrarily to what is generally believed, there is practically no fuzziness on the boundaries of the V777 Her instability strip due to traces of hydrogen in the atmospheres of some of these helium-dominated-atmosphere stars. Contrary to the blue edge, the red edge provided by TDC computations is far too cool compared to the empirical one. A similar situation was observed for the ZZ Ceti stars as well. We hence test the energy leakage argument (i.e., the red edge occurs when the thermal timescale in the driving region becomes equal to the critical period beyond which gravity modes cease to exist), which was successful to correctly reproduce the red edge of ZZ Ceti white dwarfs. Based on this argument, the red edge is qualitatively well reproduced as indicated above. However, upon close inspection, it may be about 1000 K too cool compared to the empirical one, although the latter relies on a few objects only. We also test the hypothesis of including turbulent pressure in our TDC computations in order to provide an alternate physical mechanism to account for the red edge. First promising results are presented. |
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