Magnetic fields of chemically peculiar and related stars. 2. Main results of 2015 and near-future prospects

Аннотация

We present an analytical survey of key publications concerned with the study of stellar magnetism published in 2015. We considered about 80 publications, the most significant from our point of view, presented brief reviews of them, and made generalizations. The paper considers: instruments, techniques of observations and analysis; large-scale magnetic fields of OBA stars on the Main Sequence (MS) (formation and evolution, field topology, search for new magnetic stars including the projects MiMeS, BOB, and BinaMIcS and observations with the Russian 6-m telescope, rotation and chemical abundance analysis of magnetic CP stars); magnetic fields, chemical abundance and variability of stars related to peculiar, primarily, active cool stars, solar-type stars and white dwarfs; multiple magnetic stars including interferometry data, exoplanets in a system of magnetic stars. We make a conclusion that the accuracy of magnetic field measurements has grown due to universal application of the multilinear method of observations especially with high-resolution spectropolarimeters. Usage of Zeeman-Doppler imaging technique (ZDI) when analyzing the obtained data allows us to confidently search and measure fields of complex topology of the order of 10 Gs. For the first time, a magnetic field has been detected for post-AGB stars and some other types of objects.