arXiv:1807.09407v1 [astro-ph.SR] 25 Jul 2018 oteln-rvnwn ntblt.A euto h Doppl the of result a As instability. wind e line-driven the to 2018). trwns h idisaiiylasas oapaac of appearance to also hot leads of al. instability et nature (Owocki wind supersonic hours the to of Due winds, scale velo 1997). density, typical al. wind et a Feldmeier the on 1988; in of rate wind variability mass-loss line-driven the and the to nu- that leads The shown stability 1984). have Rybicki & simulations Owocki merical 1970; Solomon & (Lucy ble eeas on fe h utato fbnr ih uv i curve in light and 2018), binary al. et of (Simón-Díaz subtraction variati the Similar after 2011). δ possi- al. found et is also Mahy 2011; (Degroot were that al. and oscillations et noise 2011) stellar Briquet al. 2010; to red et O (Blomme due the convection frequencies in subsurface multiple to the variations to attributed stochastic due bly were detected which 2244 young , the NGC on al cluster focused et run (Aerts open observing waves CoRoT gravity supergia dedicated the blue A to a 2017). attributed of was and photometry v 188209 Kepler low-frequency HD in low-amplit significant detected show was example, still ability For that variations. yet expected, light was variabl variability of no types new of discoveries foun were to constant leading stars. deemed measure variable were of be that precision stars to the result, a of As improvement ments. significant they a but to coverage, unprecedented lead with curves light of only pro not field photometers space-borne the The revolutionized li photometry. BRITE spacecrafts astronomical dedicated and MOST, board CoRoT, on Kepler, photometers of advent The Introduction 1. uy2,2018 26, July Astronomy ff r a(al ta.21) neryBsprin D2905 HD supergiant early-B in 2015), al. et (Pablo Aa Ori c,wn rvn ymlil ie nhtsasi unsta- is stars hot in lines multiple by driving wind ect, o-mltd ih aiblt nOsasmyb connected be may stars O in variability light Low-amplitude igeOsasaeatpcleape fsasfrwhich for stars of examples typical a are stars O Single ih aitosdet h iedie idisaiiyan instability wind line-driven the to due variations Light ml rcino h aitv u mte yhtsasi a is stars hot by emitted flux radiative e the This of fraction small A Received e httesmltdlgtcrei iia otelgtcurves light words. the Key to similar is curve light simulated the that needn ocnrccns h aiblt ihsc am such mil with of variability mill order The of the cones. of tens concentric is of th amplitude independent order to The the structure. due wind of stars coherent hot amplitude of with comb variability We variability light stars. light the O of predict variability to light models the for blanketing wind 1 2 ff sa ertcéfzk srfzk,Msrkv univerz Masarykova astrofyziky, a fyziky teoretické Ústav ntttfrPyi n srnme nvriä osa,K Potsdam, Universität Astronomie, und Physik für Institut c fwn lneigmyla otepooercvariabili photometric the to lead may blanketing wind of ect ff c,wihlasas otehaigo h tla photosphe stellar the of heating the to also leads which ect, & Astrophysics tr:wns uflw tr:ms-os–sas early-typ stars: – mass-loss stars: – outflows winds, stars: aucitn.oblavar no. manuscript ζ u Rmaaaato tal. et (Ramiaramanantsoa Pup lneigi stars O in blanketing .Krti J. cka ˇ tal. et e fOsasotie sn RT n oo satellites. CoRoT and BRITE using obtained stars O of idbaktn n ntblt.Tewn ntblt cau instability wind The instability. and blanketing wind e ABSTRACT 1 vide city, also mgiue n yia iecl fteodro or for hours of order the of timescale typical a and imagnitudes t,Kotlá ita, ltd sosral sn rsn pc on photometer borne space present using observable is plitude ude ari- ons iantdswe suigta h idcnit flren large of consists wind the that assuming when limagnitudes ndterslso idhdoyai iuain n fglo of and simulations hydrodynamic wind of results the ined y ehv tde h osqecso iedie idinst wind driven line of consequences the studied have We ty. r-ibnctSrß 24 arl-Liebknecht-Straße n .Feldmeier A. and ke sre yterwnsadrdsrbtdtwrslne wav longer towards redistributed and winds their by bsorbed er nt n d e - - . e stre idbaktn.Frsaswt aibewinds variable with stars For blanketing. wind termed is re, a oain ed otepooercvraiiyo magne of variability photometric to field the due to magnetic which, leads surface, the rotation, stellar of win lar the the tilt across of strength the varies the blanketing on Therefore, 2004). depends ud-Doula s & flux hot (Owocki mass magnetic in wind example, the resulti For rate, variability. mass-loss photometric the the by modulated is blanketing wind ma fixed for variability light wi any Therefore, rate. to loss redis- rate. lead of mass-loss not amount wind does and blanketing the opacity, on wind depends of tribution dependence in the 2002 redistributes impor- flux al. blanketing et wind gent Crowther The is 2005). 1986; al. al. et et and Martins (Bohannan e winds 1985) precise strong with obtaining Hummer & e for short-wavelength to (Abbott This tant the leads wavelengths. blanketing longer from also to wind mainly and spectrum flux depths of pho- part the optical pho- stellar the of low the of redistribution to at heating back especially causes emitted emission tosphere and backwards wind The the tosphere. by absorbed is 2015). al. 2 et al. Jiang et 2009; (Aerts al. lines et photospheric Cantiello of widths the a example, presence m for whose instabilities motions turbulence photospheric the photospheric with Consequently, by connected 1997). modulated al. and et initiated (Feldmeier also be may eg udvs ta.21,21;Šra ta.21,2013; 2012, al. et Šurlan a 2011; therefore estimates. and 2015) 2010, al. et al. Shenar et Sundqvist (e.g. 97.Teln-rvnwn ntblt slkl connecte likely al. is et (Feldmeier a instability emission which wind X-ray clumping, line-driven with wind The the 1997). and shocks wind sá2 Z613 ro zc Republic Czech Brno, 37 CZ-611 2, rská ˇ tr:vrals–hydrodynamics – variables stars: – e nteohrhn,i h asls aei aibe hnthe then variable, is rate mass-loss the if hand, other the On stars of the from emerging flux the of Part idisaiiisaesl-ntaig(wcie l 1988 al. et (Owocki self-initiating are instabilities Wind 2 / 5 47 osa-om Germany Potsdam-Golm, 14476 25, ff csosre idseta features spectral wind observed ects ff cietmeaue fhtstars hot of temperatures ective ff cstewn asls rate mass-loss wind the ects ril ubr ae1o 7 of 1 page number, Article e stochastic ses wind d .W show We s. blt and ability ff me of umber elengths. a wind bal c stermed is ect

spatially c S 2018 ESO the , ff emer- ybe ay ,but ), i O tic in ng ects, 009; stel- tars ss- nd d d ; A&A proofs: manuscript no. oblavar stars. This effect can partly explain the photometric light curve of HD 191612 (Krtickaˇ 2016). 18 The line-driven wind instability is another process that 16 leads to the mass-loss rate variation (Owockiet al. 1988; ]

−1 14 Feldmeier et al. 1997; Runacres & Owocki 2002). Therefore, yr 12 also the line-driven wind instability causes photometric variabil- ⊙ M ity in hot stars. This can be connected with the low-amplitude 10 variability observed in O stars. To study this possibility, we used −6 8 hydrodynamical simulation of Feldmeier et al. (1997) to derive the mass-loss rate variation and the relation between the mass- [10 6 (t) 4 loss rate and photometric flux (Krtickaˇ 2016) to predict the light . M variability. 2 0 2. Modelling of the light variability: spherically 3 3.5 4 4.5 symmetric case t [d] The calculation of the light variability of hot stars due to the line- Fig. 1. Mass-loss rate from the numerical simulations averaged over driven wind instability is a very complex problem. In general,3D r ∈ [1.01 R∗, 1.02 R∗] (see Eq. (1)) time-dependent hydrodynamical simulations of the are required to obtain the density and velocity structure of the cir- complexity. Therefore, to make the problem tractable, we calcu- cumstellar environment of hot stars and its variability. Such sim- late a mean value of the mass-loss rate in the region close to the ulations have to be coupled to a global (unified) 3D wind model star, where the wind blanketing originates, that includes the influence of the wind on the stellar (accounting for wind blanketing) and that is able to solve the ra- r2 4π 2 diative transfer equation for moving media whose ionization and M˙ (t) = r ρ |v| dr, (1) r2 − r1 Z excitation state is out of equilibrium. There is no such code that r1 would be able to treat the whole complex problem. Therefore, where ρ and v are the wind density and in par- we used existing wind simulations and global wind models and ticular time. Most of the flux in the optical domain is emitted combine their output to derive the expected light variations in from the region below the sonic point, which typically appears our stars. Due to the simplifications involved, we have not fo- at radii 1.01 − 1.02 R∗ in the numerical simulations. Therefore, cussed on a particular star or stellar type, but instead we aim to we selected r1 = 1.01 R∗ and r2 = 1.02 R∗. However, the final ff obtain general magnitude of the e ect and its properties. light curve does not significantly depend on the choice of r1 and r2. As a result of this choice, in Eq. (1) we average over 50 grid ˙ 2.1. Hydrodynamical simulations points of hydrodynamical simulation. A plot of M(t) is given in Fig. 1. The hydrodynamical simulations we have employed here were described by Feldmeier et al. (1997) in detail. The simulations 2.2. Global wind models solved continuity, momentum, and energy equation for a spher- ically symmetric non-rotating wind flow. The simulations were The variations of the emergent flux with wind mass-loss rate performed using the smooth source function method (Owocki were derived from spherically symmetric stationary METUJE 1991; Owocki & Puls 1996). The hydrodynamical part of the global wind models (Krtickaˇ & Kubát 2017). The code calcu- code is based on a standard van Leer solver. The simulations lates the wind model in a global (unified) approach that inte- use staggered mesh, operator splitting of advection and source grates the description of the hydrostatic photosphere and su- terms, advection terms in a conservative form using van Leer’s personic wind. The model solves the radiative transfer equation (1977) monotonic derivative as an optimised compromise be- in the co-moving frame (CMF) with opacities and emissivities tween stability and accuracy, Richtmyer artificial viscosity, and calculated using occupation numbers derived from the kinetic non-reflecting boundary conditions (Hedstrom 1979; Thompson equilibrium (NLTE) equations. For given stellar parameters, the 1987, 1990). A turbulent variation of the velocity at a level of model enables us to predict the radial dependence of the density, roughly one third of the sound speed was introduced as seed per- velocity, and temperature from hydrodynamicalequations and to turbation for unstable growth at the wind base. derive the wind mass-loss rate M˙ and the stellar emergent flux The hydrodynamical simulations were performed for spe- that accounts for the wind blanketing. cific stellar parameters corresponding to ζ Ori A, that is the For our modelling we assumed a typical parameters of O effective temperature Teff = 31500K, radius R∗ = 24 R⊙, and stars corresponding to HD 191612, Teff = 36000K, R∗ = mass M = 34 M⊙, and yielded the mean mass-loss rate M˙ 0 = 14.1 R⊙, and M = 29.2 M⊙. To model the dependence of the −6 −1 3 × 10 M⊙ yr . The simulations are robust against changes in emergent flux on the mass-loss rate with fixed stellar parame- stellar parameters. Consequently, the relative variations of wind ters, we artificially scaled the radiative force in the wind. This density derived for such specific parameters are also applicable yields a series of wind models and emergent fluxes F(λ, M˙ ) pa- to other O stars. rameterized by the wind mass-loss rate. Because the amount of The calculation of the wind blanketing directly from the the flux redistributed by the wind depends on the effective tem- hydrodynamic simulations would require solution of radiative perature, we expect slightly different dependence for stars with transfer and kinetic equilibrium equations (also called NLTE different temperature. However, because we are concerned with equations) for non-monotonic velocity law. To our knowledge, typical light variations, we limited our study to just one star. On there is no such code that is able to treat this problem in its full the other hand, such selection affects only the amplitude of the

Article number, page 2 of 7 J. Krticka,ˇ A. Feldmeier: Light variations due to the line-driven wind instability and wind blanketing in O stars

Feldmeier et al. (2003) and assumed that the stellar wind con- sists of N concentric cones. We assumed that each of these cones is independent, and that the mass-loss rate from the i-th cone −0.01 2 with stellar surface cross-section ΩiR∗ at time t is Ω M˙ (t) = i M˙ (t + ∆t ), (3) i 4π i

[mag] 0 p where ∆t is random for each i and M˙ (t) is given by Eq. (1).

H i

∆ Moreover, we assumed that M˙ (t) varies periodically with the pe- riod given by the time extent of available simulations (which is 0.01 about 1.5d, see Fig. 1). The cones were selected in such a way that Ωi is roughly the same for all cones. We divided the visible stellar surface into el- 3 3.5 4 4.5 ements bounded by a specified number of concentric rings. The t [d] first element that directly faces the observer is assumed to spec- ify just one cone. The number of cones specified by other rings Fig. 2. Light curve calculated using Eq. (2) for the mass-loss rate varia- is selected in such a way that solid angle set by the cones is tions plotted in Fig. 1 roughly equal to solid angle of the first cone. The number of cones is therefore a function of the number of rings. Because we specify the number of latitudinal rings, we cannot calculate the light curve. The preliminary results derived for 300-1 model of light curves for an arbitrary number of cones. Krtickaˇ & Kubát (2017, the model has parameters close to that The magnitude difference between the observed flux fHp (t) at used in hydrodynamical simulations) indicate that the amplitude ref a given time and the reference flux f in passband Hp is defined of the variability due to the wind blanketing does not signifi- Hp cantly depend on stellar parameters. as The light variability is derived from a relation between the fHp (t) Hp magnitudes and mass-loss rate (Krtickaˇ 2016, Eq. (2)) ∆Hp(t) = −2.5 log . (4)  f ref   Hp  ∆F M˙ (t)   ∆Hp(t) = −2.5 log(e) log , (2)   F0 M˙ 0 ! The reference flux is obtained under the condition that the mean magnitude difference over the simulated lightcurve is zero. The 7 −1 −2 8 −1 −2 where ∆F = 1.6 × 10 erg s cm , F0 = 9.0 × 10 erg s cm radiative flux in a passband Hp at the distance D from the spher- is the emergent flux for a reference mass-loss rate, and M˙ 0 ical star is (Hubeny & Mihalas 2014) is the mean mass-loss rate. The relation was derived for HD 191612 parameters using METUJE global wind models R 2 f (t) = ∗ I (θ, Ω, t)cos θ dΩ. (5) (Krtickaˇ & Kubát 2017). Hp Hp  D  Z visible surface 2.3. Calculated light curve The intensity I (θ, Ω, t), at angle θ with respect to the normal The light curve calculated using Eq. (2) for the mass-loss rate Hp to the surface was obtained at each surface point with spherical variations plotted in Fig. 1 is given in Fig. 2. The amplitude of the coordinates Ω from the emergent flux taking into account the light curve is of the order of 0.01mag and the typical timescale limb darkening u (θ) of the light variability (hours) is the same as the timescale of the Hp variability of the mass-loss rates as derived from the simulations. u (θ) The amplitude of the light curve is proportional to the mass- ˙ Hp ˙ IHp (θ, Ω, t) = uHp (θ) IHp (θ = 0, M(Ω, t)) = FHp (M(Ω, t)), loss rate variations, which depend on the surface perturbations. huHp i The light variations are therefore stronger for stronger base per- (6) turbations. The wind structure is triggered by the photospheric perturbations, which therefore determine the time scale of the with limb darkening coefficients from Reeve & Howarth (2016). π/2 variability. hu i = π u θ θ θ θ Here Hp 2 0 Hp ( )cos sin d . The emergent flux ˙ FHp (M(Ω, t)) is obtainedR from Eq. (2) modified for fluxes, and 3. The case without spherical symmetry the mass-loss rate M˙ (Ω, t) is given by Eq. (3) for a cone that Within a spherical symmetry we assumed that mass-loss rate corresponds to given coordinates Ω. variations are coherent across the stellar surface. This assump- The resulting light curves are given in Fig. 3. From this figure tion is highly unrealistic for real wind variations. However, the it follows that the amplitude of the light variability due to wind coherence length in the horizontal direction is unclear. A typical instability quickly decreases with the number of cones. On the patch size of the instability generated structure is of the order of other hand, even with a relatively large number of cones, the degrees, as inferred from observations (e.g. Dessart & Owocki light variability should be detectable with satellite photometry. 2002) and the typical number of clumps in the observed part 3 5 of the wind is of the order of 10 –10 (Davies et al. 2007; 4. Comparison with observations Oskinova et al. 2007; Nazé et al. 2013; Šurlan et al. 2013). To account for the deviation from spherical symmetry, We used Period04 (Lenz & Breger 2005) to analyse the simu- we followed the approach of Dessart & Owocki (2002) and lated light curves (see Fig. 4). The general shape of the Fourier

Article number, page 3 of 7 A&A proofs: manuscript no. oblavar

Table 1. Parameters of the fit Eq. (7) of the Fourier spectrum N = 1 N = 6 Parameter a b −0.01 N = 75 Simulation N = 1 −0.030 −2.87 N = 6 −0.027 −3.25 N = 75 −0.034 −3.71 Star HD37128 −0.11 −2.93

[mag] 0 HD 46150 −0.035 −4.26 p − − H HD 46223 0.037 3.94

∆ HD 46966 −0.032 −4.49 0.01

0.04 3 3.5 4 4.5 t [d] 0.02

Fig. 3. Light curve calculated using Eq. (4) for different number N of [mag] B

concentric cones ∆ 0

10 −0.02

N = 1 BRITE N = 6 N = 75 −0.04 1 0 5 10 15 20 −1 10 JD − 2456705

−2 Fig. 5. Portion of the light curve of ǫ Ori derived using the BRITE 10 satellite. Difference between the actual and mean magnitudes is plotted. amplitude [mmag]

−3 10 on the assumed number of cones, while the amplitude of peaks 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 (described by b) depends on N. The fit of results from Table 1 ν [d−1] shows that the parameter b varies with N on average as b = −0.45 log N − 2.88. (8) Fig. 4. Fourier analysis of the light curves given in Fig. 3 The simulated light curve can be compared, for example, with the light curve of ǫ Ori (HD 37128, B0Ia) derived using spectrum does not significantly depend on the number of cones the BRITE satellites. The BRITE- consists of six used to calculate the light curve. The Fourier spectrum shows satellites working in blue and red domains of visible spectra maximum at the frequency of about 3d−1 which corresponds to (Weiss et al. 2014). The satellites provide high-precision pho- the characteristic times scale of the variability of the mass-loss tometry of bright objects including chemically peculiar stars, rate. The location of the maximum peak is nearly independent of pulsating stars, and Be stars (Baade et al. 2016; Weiss et al. the number of assumed cones. There are further peaks at higher 2016; Daszynska-Daszkiewicz´ et al. 2017; Handler et al. 2017). frequencies. An additional low-frequency peak at about 1d−1 is The data were downloaded from the BRITE public data archive1. most likely connected with the length of available simulations. We used observations of ǫ Ori obtained by BAb (BRITE- Due to a stochastic nature of the light curves, a direct com- Austria) satellite between JD 2456628 – 2456734. We used ob- parison of the simulated and observed light curves is not mean- servations in a blue filter which covers the wavelength range of ingful. On the other hand, it is possible to compute the Fourier 390–460nm(Kaiser et al. 2008). The observeddifferential light spectrum of the light curves, fit the spectrum by some phe- curve shows complex variability with amplitude comparable to nomenological model, and compare the fit parameters derived the simulated light variations in Fig. 2 and a typical timescale for observed and simulated light curves. Similar techniques are of about 1d (see Fig. 5 and also David-Uraz et al. 2017). A cor- used to study time series in various contexts, for example, light responding peak appears also in the Fourier spectrum in Fig. 6. curves of X-ray binaries (Burderi et al. 1993), solar flare data Consequently, while the time scale of the variability is compa- (Threlfall et al. 2017), or to search for granulation in Cepheids rable to that derived from simulations, the interpretation of the (Derekas et al. 2017). amplitude of the observed variability would require either a co- To compare the theoretical light curves with observations, herent wind variability or a very strong base perturbation. we fitted the Fourier spectrum A(ν) in Fig. 4 by a polynomial The inspection of the BRITE archive revealed that a sim- A(ν) ν ilar type of variability is also likely present in two additional log = a + b. (7) 1 mmag! 1d−1 ! stars ζ Ori A (O9.2Ib, HD 37742, HR 1948) and J Pup (B0.5Ib, HD 64760, HR 3090). The light variations of these stars have The fit parameters given in Table 1 demonstrate that the shape of the Fourier spectrum (given by a parameter) does not depend 1 https://brite.camk.edu.pl/pub/index.html

Article number, page 4 of 7 J. Krticka,ˇ A. Feldmeier: Light variations due to the line-driven wind instability and wind blanketing in O stars

10 4 HD 46150 2 1 0 −2 −1

10 magnitude [mmag]

∆ −4 amplitude [mmag] 4 HD 46223 10−2 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 2 −1 ν [d ] 0 −2 Fig. 6. Fourier spectrum of the light curve of ǫ Ori −4 magnitude [mmag] ∆ roughly the same amplitude and the time scale as light vari- 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 ations of ǫ Ori (see also Buysschaert et al. 2017). The star ζ Ori A has weak magnetic field and the rotational period of JD − 2456211 about 6.8d (Blazère et al. 2015) and therefore it enables us to study the interaction of atmospheric turbulent motions and mag- 3 netic field. Both stars show the line profile variability due to HD 46966 corotating interacting regions (Howarth et al. 1998; Kaper et al. 2 1999), which are likely unrelated to large-scale magnetic fields (David-Uraz et al. 2014). Because the line-driven wind instabil- 1 ity is possibly present in all hot star winds being one of the sources of their X-ray emission (e.g. Antokhin et al. 2008; Nazé 0 2009), the light variations due to to corotating interacting regions and wind instabilities coexist. −1

The open cluster NGC 2244 observational run of the CoRoT magnitude [mmag] satellite provides even more promising results. The photomet- ∆ −2 ric study of the O9V star HD 46202 (Briquet et al. 2011) re- vealed multiple frequencies in the range 2 − 5d−1 and ampli- −3 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 tude of the order of 0.01mmag. This can be explained as a re- sult of wind blanketing due to multiple small-scale wind per- JD − 2454750 turbations. O stars HD 46150, HD 46223, and HD 46966 show small amplitude stochastic variations (Blomme et al. 2011, see Fig. 7. Portion of the light curve of O stars derived using the CoRoT also Fig. 7) that can be connected to the subphotospheric con- satellite. Difference between the actual and mean magnitudes is plotted. vection (Aerts & Rogers 2015). Comparing with Fig. 3 follows that such variability can be caused by a relatively large number of wind perturbations and wind blanketing. pendence of optical flux on the wind mass-loss rate derived from This conclusion is further supported by the comparison of global wind models. the Fourier spectra (Fig. 8) and their fit parameters in Table 1. The resulting light curve has amplitude of the order of hun- The slope parameters a of the spectra based on predicted light dredths of magnitude with a typical time scale of several hours. curves are close to the theoretical results. From Eq. (8) it fol- The amplitude is of the order of millimagnitudes (and lower) lows that the observed light variability is likely caused by a very when assuming that the wind consists of concentric cones in large number of cones N ∼ 102 − 104, which is consistent with which the wind behaves independently. Such variability is still results of numerical simulations (Sundqvist et al. 2018). Numer- observable using high precision photometry. ical tests using the uncertainties of observed data showed that We compared the derived light curve with light curve of ǫ Ori the Fourier spectrum in Fig. 8 is at least one order of magnitude obtained using the BRITE satellite and with light curves of O higher than that of observational noise. Therefore, the Fourier stars from open cluster NGC 2244 obtained by CoRoT satellite. spectra in Fig. 8 should correspond to stellar variations. The observed light curves show stochastic variability with ampli- tude and time scale comparable to that derived from simulations. The light curves of NGC 2244 stars yield Fourier spectra that 5. Discussion and conclusions have the same shape as the Fourier spectra of the predicted light curves and the amplitudes that imply presence of large number We simulated the light variability of O stars due to variable wind (N ∼ 102 − 104) of independent surface patches. The shape of blanketing modulated by line-driven wind instability. We used the Fourier spectrum is slightly different for ǫ Ori, but this may the output from hydrodynamicalwind simulations and combined be connected with a narrow range of frequencies available for the derived time dependence of the mass-loss rate with the de- analysis.

Article number, page 5 of 7 A&A proofs: manuscript no. oblavar

1 and require order of magnitude lower mass-loss rate variations HD 46150 than those invoked by wind instabilities (David-Uraz et al. 2017). Therefore, from Eq. (2) we expect up to millimagnitude 10−1 variations due to corotating interaction regions. The light variability due to the wind blanketing is another piece of puzzle to the general picture of variability in O stars. −2 The subsurface convective motions trigger surface light varia- 10 tions connected with pulsations and variable wind blanketing leading to perturbations that disseminate in the wind initiating

amplitude [mmag] −3 the line-driven wind instability. 10 Acknowledgements. JK acknowledges support by grant GA CRˇ 16-01116S. HD 46223 Based on data collected by the BRITE Constellation satellite mission, designed, 10−1 built, launched, operated and supported by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), the University of Vienna, the Technical University of Graz, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), the University of Toronto Institute for −2 Aerospace Studies (UTIAS), the Foundation for Polish Science & Technology 10 (FNiTP MNiSW), and National Science Centre (NCN). The CoRoT space mis- sion, launched on 2006 December 27, was developed and operated by the CNES, with participation of the Science Programs of ESA, ESA’s RSSD, Austria, Bel- 10−3 gium, Brazil, Germany and Spain. amplitude [mmag]

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