Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics – Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2011-09-23
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
To appear in the proceedings of the conference "Stellar Polarimetry: From Birth to Death" held in Madison, Wisconsin, in June
Scientific paper
During the last decade, the FORS1 instrument of the ESO Very Large Telescope has been used to obtain low resolution circular polarized spectra for about 500 stars, with the aim of measuring their mean longitudinal magnetic fields. Magnetic field estimates were obtained by different authors, using different software tools. Several interesting detections were obtained at a 3 sigma level; some of them were eventually confirmed by follow-up investigations, some of them were not. This raises issues about the reliability of the stated uncertainties of some of the published field values. To investigate these problems, we have developed a semi-automatic procedure for magnetic field determination, which includes self-consistent checks for field detection reliability. We have applied our procedure to the full content of single star ("fast mode") circular spectropolarimetric measurements of the FORS1 archive, and explored the details and interagreement of various methods for data reduction. We have finally produced a catalogue of FORS1 longitudinal field measurements which includes about 1000 entries. Here we critically review the previously published FORS1 measurements, and, based on our results, we suggest that the incidence of the magnetic field in various classes of stars should be revised.
Bagnulo Stefano
Fossati Luca
Kochukhov Oleg
Landstreet John Darlington
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