Modeling the hot subdwarf PB 8783 by asteroseismology

We present the preliminary seismic modeling of one of the hottest and most compact subdwarf pulsators, PB 8783 (EO Ceti). This is a well observed hot subdwarf star, including a 78 d campaign in white light photometry that we carried out at Mount Bigelow, Arizona, during the fall 2007. PB 8783 has also been observed at length in spectroscopy, revealing a spectrum highly contaminated by a main sequence companion. It is extremely difficult to disentangle the contribution of the two components and, as a consequence of this, the exact nature of the hot subdwarf (sdB or sdO star) is undetermined. We propose here to test the two hypotheses by asteroseismology. Although the sdB possibility cannot be excluded, the pulsation modes observed in PB 8783 are much better accommodated in the case of an sdO star.