2001/08/26 by Pawel Pietrukowicz, Pietrukowicz, Pawel
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics (astro-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.astro-ph/0108407
small changes, 17 pages with 9 figures, latex, published in Acta Astronomica, 51, 247
arxiv created 2001/11/27 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
Observations of Cepheids in the Large Magellanic Cloud, made over the last several decades, allow us to search for evolutionary period changes. None of the Cepheid from our sample of 378 stars stopped pulsating. Also none of them showed a large period change which could indicate mode switching. However for Cepheids with log P > 0.9 we found significant period changes, positive as well as negative. A comparison between the observed period changes and theoretical predictions shows moderate agreement with some models (Bono et al. 2000), and a very large disagreement with others (Alibert et al. 1999). The large differences between the models are likely caused by the very high sensitivity of stellar evolution during core helium burning phase to even small changes in the input physics, as discovered by Lauterborn, Refsdal and Weigert (1971).