A Driving Mechanism for the Newly Discovered Class of Pulsating Subdwarf B Stars

Abstract

We present new calculations that strongly reinforce the idea—originally proposed by Charpinet et al.—that pulsation modes are driven through an opacity bump due to a local enhancement of the iron abundance in the envelopes of sdB stars. Our improved models incorporate nonuniform iron abundance distributions obtained through the condition of diffusive equilibrium between gravitational settling and radiative levitation. They also include special Rosseland opacity tables that take into account the large variations of the iron abundance about the cosmic value that are predicted by equilibrium radiative levitation theory. For representative models with M = 0.48 M☉ and log g = 5.8, we find strong instabilities for low-order radial and nonradial (p and f) pulsation modes in the range 36,500 K Teff 29,000 K. The four pulsating sdB stars currently known all have effective temperatures in that range. In addition, one of our models with Teff = 34,000 K has a band of unstable modes with periods in the range 116-195 s, in excellent agreement with those of the known pulsators. We therefore claim that our proposed iron bump mechanism provides a natural explanation for the instabilities found in the newly discovered class of pulsating sdB stars.