ESTER

The project aims at the understanding of the evolution of rapidly rotating stars. This study will be done by the construction of a numerical code computing the structure and the evolution of a fast rotating star in two dimensions. The novelty of the project is to include a self-consistent approach of the large-scale flows that arise in a rotating star as well as its non-spherical shape. The resulting model will be a world first. The associated research programme is focused on the evolution of stars on the main sequence. It is organized in two parts. The first part is centered on an evolution without mass-loss and is illustrated by the case main-sequence delta-scuti stars. This choice is motivated by the applications to asteroseismoloty and the exploitation of the CoRoT data. The second part is devoted to a main sequence evolution with mass-loss, with a focus on fast rotating massive stars. Here, implications on galaxies evolution, the yields of first stars, or the understanding of the progenitors of gamma ray bursts motivate this choice. At the end of this work, the scientific community will dispose of a rather complete study of rotational mixing in fast rotating stars and a code able to compute the evolution of these stars, thus opening a vast number of applications. During the project, versions of the code with simple but self-consistent physics will be released under GNU licenses.