The pulsational behaviour of variable stars in the lower part of the instability strip

Abstract

The lower part of the classical instability strip and the surrounding main sequence are populated by a large variety of pulsating variable stars. In the past years a great effort was made by the stellar group of Brera Observatory to collect a large amount of photometric and spectroscopic data on Delta Sct stars, the more numerous class. In this paper I will describe our approach to this study. In Sect. 2.1 I show as the light curves of high-amplitude Delta Sct stars can be described in a synthetic and powerful way by using the Fourier decomposition. In Sect. 2.2 some interesting cases are presented, i.e. the peculiar light curves of some double-mode pulsators and the multiperiodicity of V974 Oph. As regards the small amplitude Delta Sct stars, the results which can be extracted from the photometry and (high-resolution) spectroscopy are discussed in Sect. 3; the importance of combining the two techniques into the synergic approach is stressed. As a final step, an excursus on the Gamma Dor stars is presented in Sect.4; the rich pulsational content makes these stars very similar to Delta Sct variables.