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.