The first decade of RR Lyrae space photometric observations

Abstract

Space-based photometric telescopes stirred up stellar astrophysics in the last decade, and RR Lyrae stars have not been an exception from that either. The long, quasi-continuous, high-precision data from MOST, CoRoT and Kepler revealed a wealth of new insights about this well-known variable class. One of the most surprising mysteries turned out to be the apparent omnipresence of a common additional mode in all RRd and RRc stars. Moreover, fundamental-mode stars seem to populate two distinct classes, one of which is characterized by the presence of additional modes and/or modulation, and another limited to strict single-mode pulsation. The presence of additional modes and multiple modulations in RRab stars allowed us to construct Petersen diagrams for these parameters: while the pulsation modes show clear structures according to period ratios, there seems to be no relation between the modulation periods themselves.