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Ian Berry

Publications and source records attributed to Ian Berry.

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The $\delta$ Scuti pulsator occurrence as a function of age, $T_{\rm eff}$, rotation, and metallicity

Many A- and F- type stars do not display $\delta$ Scuti pulsations, despite being located within the instability strip. We use photometry from the TESS Mission to discover and study $\delta$ Scuti pulsators in open clusters within 500 pc and with ages between ~20 and 900 Myr, which provide a unique opportunity to study $\delta$ Scuti pulsators in coeval populations with uniform chemical composition. We measure pulsator occurrence, which corrects the pulsator fraction for incompleteness, across all clusters. We find that clusters younger than 200 Myr tend to exhibit higher occurrence rates, with an average occurrence of 88$\pm$3\%. The occurrence rates in clusters older than 200 Myr tend to resemble the pulsator fraction of field-star samples, with an average occurrence of 62$\pm$3\%. In addition, we find that pulsators tend to rotate more rapidly in older clusters than their younger counterparts and that hotter pulsators may stop pulsating earlier than their cooler counterparts. These results show that pulsator occurrence decreases with age and that rapid rotation is critical in maintaining $\delta$ Scuti pulsations over time.

astro-ph.SR

Discovery of 79 $\delta$ Scuti Stars in NGC 3532 Suggests a Decrease of Pulsator Occurrence with Age

Many A-F type stars do not display $\delta$ Scuti pulsations, despite being located within the instability strip. Open clusters provide a unique opportunity to study $\delta$ Scuti pulsations among coeval populations with uniform chemical composition. Here we use data from the TESS Mission to discover 79 $\delta$ Scuti pulsators in the 300 Myr old open cluster NGC 3532, the largest number found within a single open cluster to-date. We report a $50\pm5\%$ pulsator fraction in NGC 3532, considerably lower than in younger stellar populations, such the Pleiades (110 Myr), NGC 2516 (100 Myr), and the Cep-Her Complex ($\leq\,$80 Myr), and similar to the pulsator fraction found among field star samples. We introduce the concept of pulsator occurrence, which corrects for incompleteness, and find it to be $63\pm6\%$. For the stars that do pulsate, we find that the hotter stars occupy a distinct branch in the color-magnitude diagram (CMD) due to faster rotation ($>\,$150 km/s) than their non-pulsating counterparts. These results suggest that pulsator occurrence decreases with age and that rapid rotation is important in maintaining $\delta$ Scuti pulsations over time. We also investigate the Period-Luminosity (P-L) relation and the $\nu_{\rm max}$--$T_{\rm eff}$ relation of $\delta$ Scuti stars in NGC 3532. We find much scatter in the P-L relation of the dominant mode and two distinct branches in the $\nu_{\rm max}$--$T_{\rm eff}$ relation, similar to the Cep-Her Complex.

astro-ph.SR