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13–17 May 2024
University of Pittsburgh / Carnegie Mellon University
US/Eastern timezone

Axion Constraints from Evolution and Dynamical Mass Determination of Cepheids

Not scheduled
15m
University of Pittsburgh / Carnegie Mellon University

University of Pittsburgh / Carnegie Mellon University

Astro-particle Physics Astro-particle Physics

Speaker

Thomas Gehrman (University of Oklahoma)

Description

Axions are favored as a possible dark matter candidate. They can be produced in large quantities in stellar environments and have non-trivial effects on stellar evolution. Cepheid variables are particularly sensitive to axion production: the Cepheid blue loop stages can be eliminated if the axion coupling to Standard Model particles is strong enough and axions are produced copiously. This has implications for the Cepheid mass discrepancy problem, which is the 10-20% discrepancy between the determination of a Cepheid's mass from pulsation models compared to evolutionary models. We probe constraints on the axion coupling coming from the elimination of the blue loop stages and from the mass discrepancy problem. We carefully treat astrophysical uncertainties in our work such as stellar rotation, convective overshoot, and composition.

Authors

Mr Edward Walsh (University of Oklahoma) Kuver Sinha (University of Oklahoma) Pearl Sandick (University of Utah) Tao Xu (The University of Oklahoma) Thomas Gehrman (University of Oklahoma)

Presentation materials

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