The AB Dor Picture Gallery
The starspots and corona of AB
Dor
A computer reconstruction shows the surface of the young star AB Doradus
to
be mottled by the giant
starspots that betray its twisting rotation. The
St Andrews-Toulouse team have also mapped the magnetic field patterns
on
the star's surface. Tenuous hydrogen plasma, heated to 15 million
degrees
C, is trapped in the magnetic fields that arch over the star's surface.
This plasma glows in X-rays, shown here in red. (Picture credit:
A. Cameron, M. Jardine and K. Wood, University of St Andrews).
In 1997, Jean-Francois Donati & Andrew Collier Cameron published
the discovery that AB Dor's equator spins
faster than its poles. This animation presents three consecutive images
of AB Dor recorded in 1996 Dec 24, 27
and 29 respectively (in infinte loop). It shows AB Dor as viewed from
an observer in the corotating
frame. One can clearly see the lower latitude features rotating
faster than high-latitude ones.
These results were published by Donati
& Cameron (1997) and by Donati
et al (1999).
[Credit: Jean-Francois Donati, Obs. Midi-Pyrenees]
The twisting rotation of AB Doradus
The St Andrews/Toulouse imaging team measured the twisting
rotation of AB Doradus, by
tracking the rotation of individual starspots at different latitudes
over
several nights. Spots near the equator always rotate faster than those
at
the poles, but in 1988 and 1996 the difference between the
equatorial
and
polar spin rates was only half as great as in 1992 to 1995.
For a full-size JPEG version of this image, click
here.
[Credit: Andrew
Collier Cameron, University of St Andrews.]
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