Abstract:

We use the three potential description (3PD) to study the oscillatory dynamics of rotating stars. The 3PD scheme describes the exact  linearized dynamics of rotating, self-gravitating, stratified, compressible and inviscid fluids. We compute the frequencies and the displacement 
eigenfunctions for some of the inertial and gravity modes of polytropic  star models. The Coriolis force is the restoring force for the inertial modes while the gravity modes are induced by the buoyancy forces. We show that the frequencies of the inertial modes of these star models 
may be significantly different from those of a homogeneous and  incompressible model, an approximation usually made to compute the frequencies of the inertial modes of rapidly rotating stars. We will also investigate the effects of rotation on the frequencies of the gravity modes of these models. In order to test the validity and the accuracy of the  results from our approach, we compare the eigenfrequencies of some of the gravito-inertial modes of these models, computed using the 3PD, to those in the literature.