The unusual pulsation spectrum of the cool ZZ Ceti star HS 0507+0434B

Abstract

We present the analysis of one week of single-site high-speed CCD photometric observations of the cool ZZ Ceti star HS 0507+0434B. Ten independent frequencies are detected in the star's light variations: one singlet and three nearly-equally spaced triplets. We argue that these triplets are due to rotationally split modes of spherical degree l=1. This is the first detection of consistent multiplet structure in the amplitude spectrum of a cool ZZ Ceti star and it allows us to determine the star's rotation period: 1.70 +/- 0.11 d. We report exactly equal frequency, not period, spacings between the detected mode groups. In addition, certain pairs of modes from the four principal groups have frequency ratios which are very close to 3:4 or 4:5; while these ratios are nearly exact (within one part in 10^4), they still lie outside the computed error bars. We speculate that these relationships between different frequencies could be caused by resonances. One of the three triplets may not be constant in amplitude and/or frequency. We compare our frequency solution for the combination frequencies (of which we detected 38) to Wu's (1998, 2001) model thereof. We obtain consistent results when trying to infer the star's convective thermal time and the inclination angle of its rotational axis. Theoretical combination-frequency amplitude spectra also resemble those of the observations well, and direct theoretical predictions of the observed second-order light-curve distortions were also reasonably successful assuming the three triplets are due to l=1 modes. Attempts to reproduce the observed combination frequencies adopting all possible l=2 identifications for the triplets did not provide similarly consistent results, supporting their identification with l=1.