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The Tayler instability is an important but poorly studied magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) instability that likely operates in stellar interiors. The non-linear saturation of the Tayler instability is poorly understood and has crucial consequences for dynamo action and angular momentum transport in radiative regions of stars. We perform three-dimensional MHD simulations of the Tayler instability in a cylindrical geometry, including strong buoyancy and Coriolis forces as appropriate for its operation in realistic rotating stars. The linear growth of the instability is characterized by a pre-dominantly m = 1 oscillation with growth rates roughly following analytical expectations. The non-linear saturation of the instability appears to be caused by secondary shear instabilities and is also accompanied by a morphological change in the flow. We argue, however, that non-linear saturation likely occurs via other mechanisms in real stars where the separation of scales is larger than those reached by our simulations. We also observe dynamo action via the amplification of the axisymmetric poloidal magnetic field, suggesting that Tayler instability could be important for magnetic field generation and angular momentum transport in the radiative regions of evolving stars.

Massive stars die in catastrophic explosions that seed the interstellar medium with heavy elements and produce neutron stars and black holes. Predictions of the explosion’s character and the remnant mass depend on models of the star’s evolutionary history. Models of massive star interiors can be empirically constrained by asteroseismic observations of gravity wave oscillations. Recent photometric observations reveal a ubiquitous red noise signal on massive main sequence stars; a hypothesized source of this noise is gravity waves driven by core convection. We present three-dimensional simulations of massive star convection extending from the star’s centre to near its surface, with realistic stellar luminosities. Using these simulations, we predict the photometric variability due to convectively driven gravity waves at the surfaces of massive stars, and find that gravity waves produce photometric variability of a lower amplitude and lower characteristic frequency than the observed red noise. We infer that the photometric signal of gravity waves excited by core convection is below the noise limit of current observations, and thus the red noise must be generated by an alternative process.

Convection is ubiquitous in stars and occurs under many different conditions. Here we explore convection in main-sequence stars through two lenses: dimensionless parameters arising from stellar structure and parameters that emerge from the application of mixing length theory. We first define each quantity in terms familiar to both the 1D stellar evolution community and the hydrodynamics community. We then explore the variation of these quantities across different convection zones, different masses, and different stages of main-sequence evolution. We find immense diversity across stellar convection zones. Convection occurs in thin shells, deep envelopes, and nearly spherical cores; it can be efficient or inefficient, rotationally constrained or not, transsonic or deeply subsonic. This atlas serves as a guide for future theoretical and observational investigations by indicating which regimes of convection are active in a given star, and by describing appropriate model assumptions for numerical simulations.

Convection in massive main-sequence stars generates large-scale magnetic fields in their cores that persists as they evolve up the red giant branch. The remnants of these fields may take the form of the Prendergast magnetic field, a combination of poloidal and toroidal field components that are expected to stabilize each other. Previous analytic and numerical calculations did not find any evidence for instability of the Prendergast field over short time-scales. In this paper, we present numerical simulations which show a long time-scale, linear instability of this magnetic field. We find the instability to be robust to changes in boundary conditions and it is not stabilized by strong stable stratification. The instability is a resistive instability, and the growth rate has a power-law dependence on the resistivity, in which the growth rate decreases as the resistivity decreases. We estimate the growth rate of the instability in stars by extrapolating this power law to stellar values of the resistivity. The instability is sufficiently rapid to destabilize the magnetic field on time-scales shorter than the stellar evolution time-scale, indicating that the Prendergast field is not a good model to use in studies of magnetic fields in stars.

About 10 per cent of intermediate- and high-mass dwarf stars are observed to host a strong large-scale magnetic field at their surface, which is thought to be of fossil field origin. However, there are few inferences as to the magnetic field strength and geometry within the deep interiors of stars. Considering that massive stars harbour a convective core whilst on the main sequence, asteroseismology of gravity (g) modes is able to provide constraints on their core masses, yet it has so far not been used to probe the strength of their interior magnetic fields. Here, we use asteroseismology to constrain an upper limit for the magnetic field strength in the near-core region of the pulsating and magnetic B star HD 43317, based on the expected interaction of a magnetic field and its g modes. We find a magnetic field strength of order 5 × 105 G is sufficient to suppress high-radial order g modes and reproduce the observed frequency spectrum of HD 43317, which contains only high-frequency g modes. This result is the first inference of the magnetic field strength inside a main-sequence star.

Observations indicate that the convective cores of stars must ingest a substantial amount of material from the overlying radiative zone, but the extent of this mixing and the mechanism that causes it remain uncertain. Recently, Anders et al. developed a theory of convective penetration and calibrated it with 3D numerical hydrodynamics simulations. Here we employ that theory to predict the extent of convective boundary mixing (CBM) in early-type main-sequence stars. We find that convective penetration produces enough mixing to explain core masses inferred from asteroseismology and eclipsing binary studies, and matches observed trends in mass and age. While there are remaining uncertainties in the theory, this agreement suggests that most CBM in early-type main-sequence stars arises from convective penetration. Finally, we provide a fitting formula for the extent of core convective penetration for main-sequence stars in the mass range from 1.1–60M_⊙.

Convection is efficient when advection matters much more than thermal diffusion. Despite this conceptually simple definition, there are several different measures of convective efficiency which are not quite equivalent. Here we recall the definitions of these measures and examine how they are related in different limits.

Stellar evolution models calculate convective boundaries using either the Schwarzschild or Ledoux criterion, but confusion remains regarding which criterion to use. Here we present a 3D hydrodynamical simulation of a convection zone and adjacent radiative zone, including both thermal and compositional buoyancy forces. As expected, regions that are unstable according to the Ledoux criterion are convective. Initially, the radiative zone adjacent to the convection zone is Schwarzschild unstable but Ledoux stable due to a composition gradient. Over many convective overturn timescales, the convection zone grows via entrainment. The convection zone saturates at the size originally predicted by the Schwarzschild criterion, although in this final state the Schwarzschild and Ledoux criteria agree. Therefore, the Schwarzschild criterion should be used to determine the size of stellar convection zones, except possibly during short-lived evolutionary stages in which entrainment persists.