The nature of p-modes and granulation in HD 49933 observed by CoRoT ^*

T. Kallinger^1,2, M. Gruberbauer^1,3, D. B. Guenther³, L. Fossati¹ and W. W. Weiss¹

¹ Institute for Astronomy (IfA), University of Vienna, Türkenschanzstrasse 17, 1180 Vienna, Austria
² Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia, 6224 Agricultural Road, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1, Canada e-mail: kallinger@phas.ubc.ca
³ Institute for Computational Astrophysics, Department of Astronomy and Physics, Saint Marys University, Halifax, NS B3H 3C3, Canada

Received: 28 November 2008
Accepted: 20 November 2009

Abstract

Context. Recent observations of HD 49933 by the space-photometric mission CoRoT provide photometric evidence of solar type oscillations in a star other than our Sun. The first published reduction, analysis, and interpretation of the CoRoT data yielded a spectrum of p-modes with l = 0, 1, and 2.

Aims. We present our own analysis of the CoRoT data in an attempt to compare the detected pulsation modes with eigenfrequencies of models that are consistent with the observed luminosity and surface temperature.

Methods. We used the Gruberbauer et al. frequency set derived based on a more conservative Bayesian analysis with ignorance priors and fit models from a dense grid of model spectra. We also introduce a Bayesian approach to searching and quantifying the best model fits to the observed oscillation spectra.

Results. We identify 26 frequencies as radial and dipolar modes. Our best fitting model has solar composition and coincides within the error box with the spectroscopically determined position of HD 49933 in the H-R diagram. We also show that lower-than-solar Z models have a lower probability of matching the observations than the solar metallicity models. To quantify the effect of the deficiencies in modeling the stellar surface layers in our analysis, we compare adiabatic and nonadiabatic model fits and find that the latter reproduces the observed frequencies better.