AAO Colloquium.
Monday 9 December 2002 - 3:30pm AAO Conference room
Tomography of stars and stellar environments.
Andrew Collier Cameron
University of St. Andrews
Since the mid-1990s, it has become possible to map starspot
distributions and magnetic fields on the surfaces of a small number of
rapidly rotating young solar-like stars within 30 pc or so of the Sun.
These advances, driven by large-format CCD detectors and powerful, cheap
desktop computing, allow us to map and track individual starspots over
several stellar rotations, using them to trace the surface differential
rotation. Stellar magnetograms, reconstructed from circular polarization
data derived from thousands of photospheric lines, can be used to
partially reconstruct the 3-dimensional structure of the stellar corona,
providing new insights into coronal EUV and X-ray emission measures and
rotational modulation. Transient, moving H alpha absorptions caused by
neutral condensations in the corona provide an independent tracer of
coronal loop summits, and a dramatic illustration of the physical
processes that occur when the outer parts of a stellar corona are torn
open by the extreme centrifugal acceleration.
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