Doppler Imaging of Non-radially Pulsating Stars

In addition to the common applications (temperature, magnetic field, abundance distributions) the Doppler Imaging technique can also be applied to non-radial stellar pulsations (NRP). Due to their rapid rotation, the Be stars are ideal candidates for Doppler Imaging. However, for the stars for which the periodic temporal line profile variability is produced by multiple mode NRP, the classical Doppler image in not an appropriate representation. When the corotating frequencies of existing pulsation modes are non-zero, the reference frame in which the resulting NRP is quasi-stationary cannot be defined. The technique can be applied “mode-by-mode”, which is illustrated in time-wavelength and Fourier frequency domain, using the time-resolved sequence of high resolution, high signal-to-noise ratio spectra of the Be star ζ Oph.