Gravity darkening in rotating stars

Interpretation of interferometric observations of rapidly rotating stars requires a good model of their surface effective temperature. Until now, laws of the form T_eff \propto g_eff^β have been used, but they are only valid for slowly rotating stars. We propose a simple model that can describe the latitudinal variations in the flux of rotating stars at any rotation rate. This model assumes that the energy flux is a divergence-free vector that is antiparallel to the effective gravity. When mass distribution can be described by a Roche model, the latitudinal variations in the effective temperature only depend on a single parameter, namely the ratio of the equatorial velocity to the Keplerian velocity. We validate this model by comparing its predictions to those of the most realistic two-dimensional models of rotating stars issued from the ESTER code. The agreement is very good, as it is with the observations of two rapidly rotating stars, α Aql and α Leo. We suggest that as long as a gray atmosphere can be accepted, the inversion of data on flux distribution coming from interferometric observations of rotating stars uses such a model, which has just one free parameter.

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