Poster abstract details

The recently launched KEPLER mission offers an unprecedented opportunity to obtain frequency observations of main sequence stars in open clusters. Taking advantage of the common properties of these stars (same age and chemical composition), we can further constrain the physics involved in stellar modeling and gain new insight into mixing processes, such as the treatment of convection, overshooting and rotational mixing.
As it is long known, convective cores create discontinuities in the chemical profile of stars, which in turn translate into sharp variations in the adiabatic sound speed. These variations produce an oscillatory behavior of the frequencies, to which low degree p-modes are sensitive. We investigate the possibility of detecting this signature of convective cores in the frequency spectrum of low mass stars by means of suitable frequency combinations (such as differences and ratios), and study the effects of applying different convective boundary determinations and mixing prescriptions in the core. With this purpose, we have constructed different sets of evolutionary models using a stellar evolution code (GARSTEC), coupled with an oscillation package (ADIPLS) for the computation of mode frequencies.