Five New d Scuti Stars.pdf

999 Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 114:999–1005, 2002 September
2002. The Astronomical Society of the Pacific. All rights reserved. Printed in U.S.A. Five New d Scuti Stars Gregory W. Henry and Francis C. Fekel1 Center of Excellence in Information Systems, Tennessee State University, 330 10th Avenue North, Nashville, TN 37203; henry@, fekel@ Received 2002 May 21; accepted 2002 May 29 ABSTRACT. We present high-resolution spectroscopy and precision photometry of five new, relatively bright d Scuti stars. They were originally chosen as photometric comparison stars in our program of automated, high- precision photometry of solar-type stars and subsequently recognized as new variable stars. We conducted follow- up spectroscopic and photometric observations to determine the properties of the stars and their types of variability. All five of the stars presented here belong to the most common subgroup of low-amplitude, Population I d Scuti variables. One of the stars, HD 10502, is the third example of a d Scuti variable with composite broad and narrow spectroscopic line profiles suggesting the presence of a circumstellar shell or disk. 1. INTRODUCTION We have been conducting a long-term program of automated photometry to measure brightness changes in solar-type stars and compare them to brightness changes in our own Sun (Bal- iunas et al. 1998; Henry 1999). Satellite observations have revealed that the Sun’s total irradiance varies by about 0.001 mag in step with the 11 yr sunspot cycle (e.g., Willson Hudson 1991; de Toma et al. 2001). The measurement of anal- ogous variations in a sample of 350 solar-type stars with our ground-based automated telescopes requires the identification of many hundreds of comparison stars that are photometrically constant to 0.0001 mag or so. The majority of stars later than spectral class F5 do not have this level of stability (Henry 1999, his Table 5), so we are forced to seek comparisons among the early F stars.