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Abstract

Wave chaos in rotating stars

With the recent launch of the space missions COROT and KEPLER, new high-precision data become available on the oscillation modes of stars. The structure of the spectrum for slowly rotating stars like the sun is well understood theoretically, but it is not the case for rapid rotation. We study acoustic rays in models of rotating stars, and show that for increasing rotation, the dynamics of these rays undergoes a transition from integrability to partial chaos. This implies that the oscillation spectrum becomes a superposition of regular frequency patterns and an irregular frequency subset respectively associated with near-integrable and chaotic phase space regions. This opens new perspectives for rapidly rotating star seismology and also provides a new potentially observable manifestation of wave chaos in a large scale natural system.

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