Blue Large-Amplitude Pulsators (BLAPs): Possible Origin, Evolutionary Status, and Nature of their Pulsations

Abstract

The Blue Large-Amplitude Pulsators (BLAPs) constitute a new class of pulsating stars. They are hot stars with effective temperatures of Teff ~ 30000 K and surface gravities of log g ~ 4.9, that pulsate with periods in the range 20 - 40 min. In Romero et al. (2018), we proposed that BLAPs are hot low-mass He-core pre-white dwarf (WD) stars that pulsate either in high-order non-radial g(gravity) modes or low-order radial modes, including the fundamental radial mode. The theoretical modes with periods in the observed range are unstable due to the k mechanism associated with the Z bump in the opacity at log T ~ 5.25. In this work, we extend the study of Romero et al. (2018) by assessing the rate of period changes of nonradial g modes and radial modes and comparing them with the values measured for BLAPs, in an attempt to validate the proposed evolutionary scenario, and to discern whether the observed modes are high-order g modes or radial modes.